


Demonique

by BetteNoire (WeAreWolves)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: But with tentacles, Consentacles, Dom!Bucky, Enemies to Lovers, Fandom Trumps Hate, M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, Shibari, Slow Burn, Tentacles, World War 2, author is going to hell, bottom!Steve, demon!Bucky, sub!Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-03-13 23:36:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13581327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeAreWolves/pseuds/BetteNoire
Summary: “Oh come on, Steve. You look at me like you want to put me on a pedestal and worship me. You look atBarneslike you want to tear his clothes off with your teeth. Tell me why you two aren’t...?” Peggy smirks at him, because of course this amuses her greatly.Steve fidgets, trying not to blush. “Peggy, I can’t—“Peggy steps closer. “Steve. Is this an American peculiarity? Because in the British army, as long as you’re discreet, that sort of thing between two men is fine. I mean, some of our greatest war heroes, and so on.”“It’s not... that...” Steve cringes.It’s Bucky’s tentacles.And how badly he wants them inside him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [allrealities](https://archiveofourown.org/users/allrealities/gifts).



The cot opposite Steve’s creaks as Dr Erskine’s weight settles on it. “Can’t sleep?” The elderly doctor asks, his German accent pinching the e’s in sleep until they sound more like an i.

Steve sits up and drags the army-issue wool blanket around his thin shoulders. “No,” he sighs.

“Mm. Big day tomorrow,” Erskine mutters, more to himself than Steve. He’s wearing an old, ratty dressing-gown over some equally well-worn flannel pyjamas, and Steve briefly wonders why sciencing for the army seems not to pay very much. Then Steve notices he’s holding a bottle, and a couple of tooth-glasses. “Brought us a little courage from the Old World. _Apfelschnapps_.” He pours a finger’s-breadth of clear liquid into each glass and passes one over to Steve.

Steve stares at the viscous, clear liquid. It smells like firewater. Even worse than the Irish bathtub potato whisky that used to go round during Prohibition. He gags a little at the smell of apples mixed in with it. “Uh, with my conditions, I shouldn’t really be drinking hard alcohol before—“

“—the serum doesn’t work, Steven,” Erskine says quietly, into the night.

Steve slams the drink back. Christ, it’s even worse than it smells. “What?” He half-says, half-chokes afterwards.

Erskine downs his own drink and rolls the empty glass between his fingers. The man’s soft brown eyes, so kind, are wet with guilt and unshed tears. “Mm,” he says. “We could perfect what it did for the body, but… never for the brain. It burns up the mind, twists it, every time.”

Steve slumps. Of course it was too good to be true, that he could matter to the war effort. Maybe they’d let him stay in the army, at a desk job. “So we’re calling off tomorrow?”

“No,” Erskine sighs. “Here,” he continues, feeling for the bottle on the floor. “Aha.” There’s the pop of the cork, and Steve feels his glass taken from his fingers. It’s replaced again soon enough, a full measure heavier. Dr Erskine downs his second schnapps. “There are nazi agents here in New York watching this programme closely. If it looks like it is a success, they will make their move. So this has all gone from a very real experiment to a rear-guard action to catch some spies.” Erskine frowns, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his wire bifocals with his fingers. “They are willing to sacrifice a pawn to capture a knight, if that makes any sense to you.”

“…Oh,” Steve says. He swirls the awful drink and tips it down his throat. No desk job then.

When he looks up again, he can see that Erskine’s cheeks are wet with tears. “I am not willing to play any more,” Erskine whispers. “This serum… it has followed me like a black shadow of evil, first in Germany, then to America. Schmidt tells me if I work for him developing his serum, he will keep my family safe. He lies, sends them to labor camp. They die. The American agents say you can escape to America, but you must bring the serum formula and keep working on it. No serum, you stay in Germany, probably end up in camp yourself. But to give the world a serum like this… to create a race of ubermensch, of bullies… there is no way it can end well.” Erskine reaches out and grabs Steve’s hand.

Steve is so startled he lets go of the glass, which falls to the empty barrack floor with a klunk.

“But I would like to try one more thing to make it end well for you,” the scientist says, tugging Steve to his feet. “Come, and please, trust me.”

“Where are we—“ Steve squawks. He’s in his boxers and his undershirt, no clothing to be venturing outside. And he’s a little dizzy from the booze, he realises, as his legs turn all rubbery under him. He’d been too nervous to eat dinner.

Erskine’s brow is fierce, determined as he propels Steve out of the barracks and towards a disused equipment shed nearby. He’s still got the _apfelschnapps_ wedged under one arm, too. “We are making a request of someone who has helped my family before. It is a long shot. Please let me do the talking.”

Once Erskine manipulates a rusty, stiff lock, he escorts Steve inside, sits him down on an overturned bucket, and then pulls a bag of supplies out from under the corner of a tarp. The shed is maybe ten feet by ten feet, corrugated tin roof, and old wood walls. The floor is dirt. The far corner is stacked with ropes and canvas tarps, but the rest bare. A few broken rakes lean against the right wall. It smells of spiderwebs, and old tools.

Steve pulls his attention back to Erskine and notices the man has poured out salt in a circle and is currently lighting candles. There’s a white dove chuntering sleepily in a cage nearby, and on the top of its cage, a knife with a curved blade. And his stomach twists as he realises what’s going on. “ _Wait_!” Steve hisses, as Erskine reaches into the dove’s cage. “Drunkenness and casual demon summoning is not how I expected this night to go!”

Erskine sits back on his haunches and looks at Steve. His hand around the dove’s neck ruffle up its feathers into something ridiculous and old-fashioned, like a Dutch Old Master portrait of a beady-eyed burgher’s wife. But his face in the candlelight is so, so tired. “This is science, my dear boy. 10% inspiration, 90% improvisation.” Then he cuts the throat of the dove.

Dr Erskine walks around the circle, shaking out red drops of the dove’s blood onto the white salt, and chanting in what Steve is pretty sure is Hebrew. He eventually returns to stand next to Steve, placing a reassuring hand on Steve’s shoulder. He doesn’t need to. Nothing has happened.

Steve relaxes. Maybe he can just go back to sleep now. Possibly after throwing up. Maybe, if he’s really lucky, he is asleep, and this is all a dream. Or a nightmare.

Then all the candles blink out.

Dr Erskine digs his fingers into Steve’s shoulder, wordlessly bidding him to hold still. Everything inside the shed is suddenly very black, blacker than the night outside, blacker than darkness should be… and then within the blackness are pinpoints of lavender light, thousands of them, weaving in and out of themselves impossibly, like starlings rising to flight. It’s so beautiful, Steve can’t help the soft “oh” of appreciation that falls from his lips.

When Dr Erskine speaks this time, it’s in English. “Great one, once you did a favour for my family. I come again asking a boon.”

The lights murmur and growl to themselves. Then the candles flare back on, twice as high as before, and Steve sees that the lights aren’t stars, or birds, but spots of phosphorescence on a giant mass of grey tentacles writing in midair, in physically impossible ways.

Steve gulps, and throws up all over his own feet.

When he looks up, the Lovecraftian horror has reached out one of those tentacles and is tilting Dr Erskine’s head with it one way and then the other. There’s more of the strange sound like the dragging of graves emerging from the creature.

Then, a husky, harmonious man’s voice, so surprisingly pleasant it causes Steve to almost choke on a bit of his own backwash. Because the sound is coming _from inside his own head._

_Mm. The… boy? And the fish._

“Yes, that’s right, great one,” says Dr Erskine, who is somehow not huddled in a ball on the floor clutching at his own head, like Steve is.

The tentacle retracts. _Was there also a dog?_ It asks, sounding almost confused.

“Yes,” Dr Erskine says, and somehow he’s smiling, how do you smile in this situation, “there was a dog.”

 _Well, as you see, my status has somewhat changed since then_ , the demon says, doing something particularly nauseating and impossible in three-dimensional space. Steve feels his bile rise once again.

“I try not to judge a creature by where they have been, but where they are going,” says Dr Erskine.

 _What do you want from me?_ The demon asks.

Dr Erskine indicates Steve, patting him on the back to make him sit up straight. “Tomorrow, I need you to turn this one into a perfect male specimen. A super soldier. And see that he gets home from the war safely.”

 _And when he dies, he is mine?_ The demon asks. Steve can feel it looming over him. He’s shaking like a leaf, eyes squeezed shut against the squamous horror of its roiling tentacles.

“Yes,” Erskine says.

 _Hm_ , says the demon. _He’s a little… small._

“Oh, fuck, not you too,” Steve grits out. “Look, can we keep the personal insults out of this? I’m not exactly here entirely of my own free will so I’d at least like to be treated—”

 _Oh, Israelite, no. He must agree completely on his own_ , the deep voice rumbles through his head.

Erskine makes an opening-of-hands motion to Steve, please and come on.

Steve scrubs his forearm over his weeping eyes and then the mess of snot and upchuck that is his nose and lips. He spits out a last bit of what seems to be diced carrot, then tries to look the demon squarely in its… central mass. “You can do this?” Steve croaks out. “You can make me into someone healthy enough to fight?“

The demon makes a sound that is at the same time utterly dismissive, and pleasantly amused. _Yes. And I will keep you safe in battle. I know wars._

“Thank you, but I can take care of myself,” Steve says.

The demon laughs at him. Erskine is twisting the tie of his dressing-gown and making pained faces in Steve’s direction, like he’s cocking something up that could have enormously dangerous consequences.

And Steve realises that yes, in fact, pissing off a very large demon was probably not a good idea. He’s about to say something, to reel back some of his bolshiness, when the demon’s amused voice echoes through his head. _Fine. I shall walk next to you and watch as you take care of yourself._

“Okay. I guess,” Steve says, nodding. He reckons it’s probably a good time to see if he can stand, especially as he’s ended up somehow sitting down in a puddle of his own sick. “But wait. How?” His poor, battered mind races as he thinks of the penny sci-fi books the boys used to trade behind the schoolyard. “Are you gonna be invisible?”

 _No_. The gigantic, floating, tentacled mass of the demon gives a full-body shudder, and seems to… unwind, and fall to earth in a surprisingly graceful way. And then, between the flicker of candle flames, standing in the circle is not a writhing mass of tentacles, but a handsome brunet soldier, six foot and broad, in soaking wet, bloody combats, a rifle slung across his shoulder. “I’m gonna be your best pal.”

Steve does a full Lou Costello double take. “Who the—“

“Oh, this?” The demon says. “This is the body of some poor hick from Indiana who just died in a ditch in Guadalcanal.” As the demon indicates his body, he bends down enough for Steve to see that the back of his head isn’t there, just a mess of blood and gristle where skull should be.

Steve dry heaves.

The demon is hitting his hips with his fists, as if annoyed at his choice of body. “What’s my name… Barnes… come along, you’re not that dead yet, give me something I can work with.”

Erskine clears his throat and points to the back of his head.

The demon sees him, and his expression is so perfectly ridiculous, eyebrows raised in realization, leaning forwards slightly, that for a moment, he almost passes for human. “Oh, yes,” he says, patting the back of his head. “Sorry, forgot about that.” As he touches the wound, it disappears, healing up perfectly. Then he looks down at his wet uniform, and mutters to himself, “this probably won’t do either, hmm.”

Steve is shocked to find the demon’s eyes on him, piercing, intense.

“Ah,” the fiend says. He waves a hand over himself and then he’s wearing a Marine sergeant’s service uniform, and the rifle has vanished. “That’s better. Hello, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, unit marksman, at your service. Apparently I am called Bucky, but that’s ridiculous, and we shan’t be using it.”

Steve grins. “Oh yes we will. _Bucky_.”

“Now,” the demon says. “I am asking your formal permission to allow me to step out of this circle, and complete our agreements. Usual terms and conditions apply. The Israelite knows.” Then he turns to Erskine. “You _do_ know, don’t you? I don’t like making deals with the uninformed.”

Erskine holds up a hand. “I know. The usual terms are fine.” The scientist seems unburdened somehow, as if he has cleansed himself of great sin. And Steve wonders, not for the first time, who the devils really are in this war.

His reverie is broken by the demon. “Oh come on, I am as old as the world but _still_ , I can actually _feel_ myself ageing here. Yes or no?”

Steve looks at the demon. This is, somehow, his only chance to fight, standing here right before him looking punchably smug in a tight green jacket. He shuts his eyes. “Yes. You have my permission to come forth.”

A hip bumps his. “Tsk, none of that, we’ll negotiate sexual favors later,” the demon says.

Steve grits his teeth and figures he should wait at least until he has super-strength before he punches the demon, on the grounds that it’ll hurt more then.

The demon turns to Erskine. “I’m going to watch over the small one.” Then he wriggles slightly, and something falls out of his sleeve into his hand. Not that there was any room for anything up his sleeve because Steve was pretty sure that jacket didn’t allow for circulation. He puts the thing in Erskine’s hand and Steve realises it’s a tiny, balled-up tentacle that Bucky has somehow… separated from himself. “If anyone tries to attack you,” the demon says to Erskine, “throw this at them, and I’ll come out the other end of it.” He grips Erskine’s upper arm in a way that appears warm (he’s good at this, Steve thinks, faking human) and says, “gotta get you through tomorrow, Israelite.”

“From your words to—“ Dr Erskine begins to say, then halts himself. “No, probably not any more.”

“Fraid not,” the demon says.

Steve is totally unprepared for a heavily muscled arm being slung over his shoulders, and the press of a warm, tall body against him. “So, Stevie, how’d we meet?” The demon leers at him. Then the smug grin falls and the demon sniffs him. His face crinkles. “Bleh,” he says, flapping a hand over Steve. Somehow, the crusting sick staining Steve’s underclothes and body vanishes. “That’s better,” the demon says, smugness settling over him again.

Steve wants to wriggle out from under that arm, but he’s stuck with being nice to the demon until they all get through tomorrow, and then he can work out some method of making the demon go away. He groans. “Okay, you’re from Indiana, I’m from Brooklyn,” he says. “Maybe you just moved to Indiana a couple years ago, we were school chums.”

They carry on plotting their fake friendship as the demon waltzes into the barrack room and starts stripping off his clothes, letting them land anywhere.

“What are you doing?” Steve hisses.

“Getting ready for bed?” The demon says. “Don’t tell me humans have stopped wearing comfortable clothes to bed.”

“Do you sleep?” Steve asks.

“Sometimes,” the demon says. “It’s nice. It’s not really sleeping but… it’s hard to explain. More like interdimensional drifting. I exist in more dimensions than you. Five, to be exact.”

“Well, you’re going to be in trouble in this dimension, if you get your uniform all dusty and wrinkled. You should pick it up and fold it,” Steve grumbles.

“I don’t know how,” the demon says. And the motherfucker is _pouting_ at him.

Steve folds his arms. There is no way this demon is going to have him doing his laundry for him within the first hour. No way, no sir.

The demon picks up his uniform jacket and turns it around, looking at it in what Steve is sure is faked confusion.

Steve sighs. This poor dead kid whose body the demon hijacked was one of those disgustingly good-looking midwestern boys, all freckles and cheekbones and dark hair with copper highlights and football-playing shoulders that strain the fabric of the undershirt the demon had stripped down to.

It makes him uncomfortable, that tight curve of thin cotton over muscles so well defined he can see the ridges in the creature’s deltoids as the demon attempts to sort out his jacket. Steve realises he’s been staring, and tears his gaze away, flushing with embarrassment. All of this would be so much easier if the demon hadn’t grabbed Indiana’s equivalent of Buster Crabbe as his human form.

He’s fairly successfully coaching the demon through how to fold his service uniform when the demon’s head whips up. His eyes glow that strange violet color and then he’s just— not there.

He reappears a minute later, grinning, bare-chested, covered in blood and gristle, and holding a very shaken Erskine by the arm. “Change of plan. Everybody bunks together in here.”

“W-what happened?” Steve asks. He can’t tear his eyes away from the demon, because there are about four fat tentacles hanging down off his back, curling gently and writhing in that unsettling way they have.

“Nazis,” Dr Erskine stutters. He’s pale with shock. Then he indicates Bucky. “Demon. Then… no more Nazis.”

The demon smirks and winks at him. “Been a while since I killed humans. Used a little too much force.”

Then he shakes, like a dog, and the blood staining his clothes and body… disappears. He climbs up onto a top bunk and says, “well, that was fun, big day tomorrow, see you on the other side. Oh, and holding a three-dimensional form while sleeping is hard so I might be a big pile of tentacles in the morning.”

Dr Erskine and Steve look at the demon, who’s lying on his belly with his human hands shoved under the thin army pillow, and one lazy tentacle hanging down off the bunk. Then they look at each other.

“I did not sign up for this,” Steve hisses.

“It’s war, Steven. Nobody does,” Erskine sighs. He sits down heavily on a bottom bunk. “He won’t kill you tomorrow, which is more than I can say for the US Government, and my serum.”

“How can you be so sure?” Steve says.

Erskine settles onto the bed, pulling the blankets over him. “Because that one was a very good one, once, and I think he still is.”

Steve frowns. _That one_ is a tentacle demon.

“I have to believe he can be good, Steven,” Dr Erskine says, his voice soft with sleep, “because I have nothing left but belief.”

* * *

The next morning, a flurry of black, official cars come to take them to the government lab down in Lower Manhattan where Dr Erskine had been doing the majority of his research.

Peggy steps out to greet him, takes one look at Bucky in his service uniform, and says, “Who the hell is this?”

Bucky doffs his cap and introduces himself, “Bucky Barnes, childhood friend of Steve here and doing intelligence work in the Pacific. You wouldn’t believe how many planes I had to commandeer to get here on time.” He tries a charming smile.

Peggy looks at him with daggers for eyes. “And how did you know about this at all, _sergeant_?”

“Ah,” Bucky — the demon — says. Steve must think of him as the demon, he’s _not_ Steve’s friend, he’s _not_ a charming Marine sergeant, he is a demon. An inhuman fiend. “See, I got a general very drunk in Guadalcanal, and he told me all about how we shouldn’t worry because soon we’d all be replaced by super-soldiers, each man able to fight like an entire platoon, and honestly, ma’am, I thought the old coot just had sunstroke, but then he said the first one was some scrawny kid from Brooklyn and how if they made a supersoldier out of that matchstick they could make one out of anyone, and I know only one matchstick in Brooklyn stupid enough to volunteer to be a government lab rat and so, ma’am, I pulled all my leave and high-tailed it back East. Uh, west. Um, thisaway.”

“May I see your papers, sergeant?” Peggy says icily, extending her hand.

“Oh! Yes, here they are. Very sorry. And you’ll find the bodies of three Nazis in the back dumpster over there, they tried to sneak in and kidnap Dr Erskine in the night.”

Peggy frowns at the demon’s papers. Steve knows that frown; it’s the one that Peggy makes when someone else is right and she is in danger of having to admit it. Then she walks around behind the building and looks in the dumpster. She comes back and thrusts Bucky’s papers at him, saying, “you could have left one alive for questioning, sergeant.”

“Sorry?” Bucky says. “The front makes you a bit jumpy.”

They ride to lower Manhattan in stony silence, Steve squished in the middle between a peeved Peggy and a Bucky who stares out the window of the car with a sort of childish delight.

There are speeches, in the lab. Steve is hugged by Howard Stark and has his hand shaken by about four different senators and a general or two. Bucky’s been stashed somewhere inconspicuous, in a dark corner near some lab techs, but he still manages to catch Steve’s eye and give him a thumbs-up as they bundle Steve into the machine.

Before they close the lid of it — and it’s like a chrome coffin, Steve has a sudden, horrifying image of him going mad from the serum and them keeping him entombed in the coffin while they find ways to kill him — he sees Howard Stark lean over to Dr Erskine, who is smiling.

“Don’t tell me you sorted it at the last minute,” Steve lip-reads Howard as saying. At Erskine’s nod, Howard grits out a “Yes! Shame to pop the kid. He’s a good kid.”

They step back and the lid closes, and the chrome device thrums to life. Erskine swore to him that he’d substituted a placebo, that all those ranks of needles would be injecting nothing more than saline.

The last thing he can see as he shuts his eyes and the pain begins are two lavender points of light, in the shadows.

Then he is surrounded by that lavender light, and he’s floating, and the pain stops.

The chrome coffin hisses open and Steve opens his eyes. He slowly takes stock of himself. He’s not dead. His brain still feels fine. Nothing _seems_  different.

Then he looks at Peggy, looking at him, at the awe on her face. She reaches out a finger to touch him.

Steve looks down at himself and gasps. This isn’t his body. This is the body of an Adonis. It’s…. huge. He reaches out to step out of the chrome device, shaky as a newborn foal, and in the background Howard is popping open a bottle of champagne, and then there’s another bottle—

It’s not a bottle—

Erskine falls to the ground, blood pooling beneath him. Several women who are not Peggy Carter start screaming.

Steve sees the flash of metal and the running feet from an upper gallery, and someone shouts, “He has the serum!”

And Steve thinks _fat lot of good it’ll do him_ but Steve gives chase anyway, because Nazis just shot possibly the kindest man he ever knew, and if this new body has any purpose it is to avenge its maker’s death.

Steve comes back with a body dead by cyanide, a new word (“Hydra”), and the news that the serum and Erskine’s notes are all at the bottom of the East River. He’s told that until they find a way to replicate the serum, he won’t be going to the front. Because what use is only one super-soldier? To win a war, they’d need hundreds. No, he’ll be doing PR for the government.

And in the corner, the fucking demon watches him, and Steve Rogers has had well past enough of the last 24 hours so he marches right over to Bucky Goddamn Barnes who raises his hands and says, “Steve, I can explain,” but Steve is done with lies and prevarications.

He plants his fist right in the fiend’s pretty, pretty jaw.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey I have two WIPs at once! LIVE DANGEROUSLY.
> 
> I have also had the Plague for two weeks, in which I could barely do anything other than take care of my family. I even had a fun trip to the hospital! Yay! But I’m getting better now. Apparently when my brain is delirious with fever, it can still write tentacle porn. And that’s all it can do. 
> 
> Anyway, this my first Fandom Trumps Hate fic, for cyborgoctopus, who encourages my worst tendencies, and hustled along by NurseDarry, who yells at me in the DMs about where is the tentacle fic, already. 
> 
> Now that I’m not dead of plague any more (I’m only mostly dead), updates should be weekly. For both this and How To Draw Fallen Angels.


	2. Chapter 2

They poke and prod Steve’s new body for the rest of the day. Assess him; debrief him. He spits in one cup, pees in another, jerks off in a third. In between, they take vials and vials of blood. He sees Peggy a few times, but she’s rushing around locking down the rest of the Nazi spy network and organizing the hunt for Erskine’s notes in the East River, while he’s being measured up like a prize bull at the state fair. Bucky is nowhere to be found.

Then he’s given a new uniform and taken out to dinner by Howard Stark and a couple of the Senators and one of the generals. Howard tries to get Steve to come out with them to some big Manhattan nightclub but Steve begs off, and finally Howard consents to have his driver take Steve back to barracks.

When he walks in, the first thing he sees is the demon, in his too-tight undershirt, smoking on the top bunk. The whole side of his face is puffy and bruised, and a shadow of stubble darkens his cheeks.

“You can’t smoke in here,” Steve snaps. “I’ve got—“

“No you don’t,” Bucky cuts him off. “Not any more.” He gestures with his cigarette at Steve’s body, making trails with its smoke. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Fuck you!” Steve yells. “You could have taken down Erskine’s killer as soon as he came in the room, and instead you just watched. And are you even hurt, or is this some bullshit sympathy performance?”

Bucky groans, running a hand down his face. The bruising vanishes as he touches it, as Steve expected. “One, I was busy, sorting you out. I do have my limits, Steve. I can’t do complicated metamorphosis magic and fight Nazis at the same time. And two,” he drags long on his cigarette, the cherry flaring bright, “I had a side deal with Erskine. He wanted to die, Steve. I promised him it would be swift and painless and he wouldn’t see it coming. Then I, personally, took his soul up to Heaven.” Bucky sighs and leans his head back against the wall. “That was popular, as you can imagine. I’d like to think I wasn’t such a smug, condescending asshole when I had my feathers, but I probably was.”

“Well, you’re still one now,” Steve mutters, as he begins to strip off his uniform. “Where did you run off to?” Because, much as he hates it, that’s the real source of his anger. Bucky was supposed to stick with him, and in an awful day of being treated like an object he would have taken the demon’s fake friendship over what he got instead: being talked over or through or down to. For all his infuriating habits, Bucky talked to him, Steve Rogers.

Bucky licks his lips. “After you slugged me out, I fulfilled the other part of my promise to Erskine: I walked down to the East River and reduced his notes and the serum sample into their component molecules. They can drag that river from now until Kingdom Come, and they’ll never find a thing. The super-serum is dead. Long live the super-serum.”

Steve sits down on his bed. His new body isn’t tired at all, but there’s a psychological tiredness, a bone-weariness that exhausts him. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Bucky just groans and rolls over.

Steve can hear the cigarette being stubbed out, and then there’s some more rustling, and a few tentacles unravel over the side of the bed. He’s glad he’s sleeping a few bunks over from Bucky, because waking up with those things waving in his field of vision might send him ‘round the bend.

He flops down in his own bunk and looks at them through his lashes. They’re a medium grey, and faintly shiny, as if they would be wet to touch. But he’s never seen them leave a residue on anything. Each tentacle is dotted with spots of lavender phosphorescence, bunching heavily in a line down the main axis and then becoming sparser at the tips and around the underside of the tentacle, where the grey fades to a lighter hue. They unsettle Steve, in ways he doesn’t understand.

“Stevie, want me to turn out the light?” Bucky mumbles, sleepily. A dangling tentacle lashes slowly, like a cat’s tail. Steve suddenly imagines touching it, letting it wrap around his wrist. He sits up so fast he bangs his head on the bunk above. Oh yeah. He’s taller now.

“Nah, I’ll get it, I’m closer,” Steve says, pushing the covers off himself.

But Bucky just snickers, and snaps his fingers. The light switch across the room flicks off.

“Show-off,” Steve grumbles, as they’re plunged into darkness.

“Floor’s cold,” Bucky says.

* * *

They get him a gaudy red, white and blue uniform and teach him to dance and talk at the same time, and then he’s off across America, punching out Hitler to packed houses every night. Bucky manages to sweet-talk his way along, on the basis that he plays piano and is very good at killing Nazis.

And the Nazis do come, in the night. Bucky teaches him how to throw a proper punch. They practice fighting in back alleys and on theatre rooftops and wide-open fields next to railyards.

In Philadelphia they send five agents. In Wichita, they up it to ten. Doesn’t matter. The fight always ends the same way: Steve and Bucky, knuckles bloody and grinning, standing over some fascists who won’t be getting up again.

Up in Chicago, they try something different: a bullet from afar, as Steve rehearses in the theatre. It’s the first assassination attempt in public, with witnesses. Steve hears it at the last minute and moves, the bullet grazing his shoulder rather than piercing his heart. He sees a hint of lavender light in the darkness of the mezzanine boxes, and knows Bucky will be down soon, with whatever is left of the sniper.

It’s then that Steve realises how important Bucky’s presence has become to him. It’s not that Steve never had friends, but it was hard keeping up friendships when you’d vanish for weeks at a time into a sickbed. And he never had a friend like Bucky, who is so handsome and charming that any room he walks into lights up with his sheer presence.

It didn’t help that Steve hates every goddamn minute of his roadshow. From the cheesy routine to the awful mixers afterwards, where America’s elite ogle him and drawl their vapid and bigoted opinions out for his approval. Bucky will somehow know when Steve’s about to lose it, and will make a face across the room at him, like he was William Powell and this was all some screwball comedy. Even the chorus girls with their friendly banter are no interest to Steve, they’re just a flock of canaries, and their dreams are not his dreams. They tell him every show that he is being useful, this is helping the war effort far more than him fighting, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like nothing more than a bright charade.

They ship out of Chicago before daybreak, and Bucky and Steve sprawl in their sleeper room, watching the city suburbs give way to the flat plains of Illinois as the train rocks them towards the Rockies: Denver, and then the West Coast.

“Always surprised you don’t bunk down with one of the girls,” Bucky says, stripping off his uniform. “Not like they ever stop offering.”

Steve flops down on his too-small lower bunk, and lets the train rock him. “They only want me for this, Bucky,” he says, flapping a big hand over his new body.

Bucky hops up onto his bunk and Steve prays that’ll be the last of it. But a moment later, Bucky’s head appears over the edge, upside-down. “I hope they want you for your body. I did a very good job on it. All of it.”

“Ugh,” Steve says, making the face he reserves especially for when Bucky is being gross or crude. That face sees a lot of use.

“Seriously, Steve. It’s not as if you’d want them for any more than a good time. You’re both consenting adults, you’re allowed to have fun,” Bucky says.

A few tentacles wind down over the bunk rail, helping him balance. Steve stares at them; how whatever it is that coats them doesn’t leave a mark on the shiny chrome rail.

“I’d rather wait until it’s someone that matters to me, Buck. Someone who I care for as more than just a roll in the hay,” Steve says.

“In other words, you’re not giving up on your big honking crush on Agent Carter,” Bucky teases. The tentacle nearest his face flexes, its tip describing small curves in the air.

Steve blushes. “Why don’t you ever bunk down with one of the girls? Betty Lou climbs into your lap practically every night.”

Bucky sighs and rolls onto his side. “I’m a five dimensional creature, Steve. Holding a form in three dimensions is tricky at the best of times, but damn near impossible in the middle of sex. Imagine what happens if I pop out a tentacle or two while I’m with a girl, huh?”

Steve’s mind judders to a halt; suddenly, he can’t imagine anything at all. He shifts uncomfortably.

“Besides,” Bucky yawns, “I like women, but I much prefer men.”

“Bucky!” Steve hisses. “You can’t just say that.”

“Yes I can,” Bucky huffs.

“To people other than me, I mean.”

“I don’t really talk to people other than you, Steve. None of them have anything interesting to say,” Bucky grumbles.

Steve feels an odd flash of pride in his gut at that, at learning that Steve is someone the demon prefers to be with, rather than someone he is forced to be with.

“Also, before you ask, that’s not why I got kicked out of heaven,” Bucky says.

Bucky’s change in position means most of his tentacles are back up on the bunk with him, but one loops down, its end still curled around the rail but its length hanging in a U-shape like a boa constrictor. Steve watches it sway with the movement of the train. He can’t look away from it, the soft grey underside, the evident muscle and power in the appendage, the spots of phosphorescence…

“You can touch it, if you want,” Bucky says softly.

Steve jackknifes in shock, shoving his stupid giant body as close to the wall of the bunk as he can, away from the tentacle. A blush burns its way down his body as he stutters, “N-no, it’s okay.”

“Okay,” Bucky says. “Sorry.” The hanging tentacle withdraws back up onto Bucky’s bunk.

* * *

When they arrive in Denver, they find out that the brass was so excited about Steve beating the assassination attempt in Chicago that they want to fly him out to the front to do some propaganda films showcasing Captain America, the unstoppable soldier, and his sidekick, Bucky. (“What? No fucking way,” says the erstwhile sidekick. Steve can’t answer with how hard he’s laughing.)

They do the show, and the next morning are put on a plane to New York and then a ship to Italy.

“Well,” Bucky says, as the lights of New York harbour fade into the horizon, “You got your wish. We’re off to war.”

The week on board ship sees Steve in a state of mounting anticipation, every mile closer to Europe feels like a mile closer to his true purpose. Bucky is strangely quiet in comparison. He spends a lot of time on deck just staring out across the water. Steve asks him if anything’s wrong, but Bucky just bumps his shoulder and says he’s fine and then wanders off somewhere to be by himself. They have separate cabins on the ship, which was presented to them as a real luxury, but Steve just feels lonely and restless without his friend sleeping in the bunk above him.

On the fourth night in, Bucky is missing. Steve searches the whole ship, twice, and he’s nowhere to be found. He’s sitting in Bucky’s room, wondering what to do, when Bucky just… appears, naked as a jay bird and soaking wet.

“Fuck,” he exults, shaking himself off, and then: “Steve!”

Steve stands up so fast he bangs his head on the cabin’s curved ceiling. He tries to look anywhere other than Bucky’s naked body, at the water droplets running down him. The cabin is suddenly very small. Bucky smells of the ocean; he has seaweed caught in his hair.

Bucky grabs a towel and wraps it around himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. I, uh, I went for a swim…”

“That’s dangerous, Bucky,” Steve says, sinking back down into his chair.

Steve supposes he deserves the eye roll he gets.

Bucky sits down on his bed. “I didn’t swim like this, Steve. I needed to…” he gestures.

“…be a tentacle demon,” Steve finishes for him.

“Yeah. I’ve been working hard on holding this form 24/7 here and… I wanted to cut loose a bit. The fish don’t care.” Bucky bites his lip as he uses another towel to dry himself off. “I mean, actually, the fish run away, but everyone runs away, so…”

“Bucky,” Steve says, his gut clenching, “are you… is this because of me?”

Bucky doesn’t answer, but his eyes are wide, and wet, and they won’t meet Steve’s. “It’s because of everyone,” he breathes, finally. “I spent a long time being one of the most beautiful things in existence, and…” He smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “…it’s a very clever punishment.”

“Bucky…” Steve says. “You’re still beautiful.”

Bucky frowns at him. “I picked the prettiest dead kid I could find. Vanity, nothing more.”

Steve reaches out his hands. “Bucky. Tentacle,” he says.

Bucky gives him a puzzled look.

“Where are your tentacles? I want to touch one of them. I’ve been a jerk to you, Bucky, and I’m trying to make it up.”

Bucky rolls his shoulders, and five or six fat tentacles unroll from where his wings must have once been.

Steve wiggles his fingers, gimme.

Bucky slowly extends one tentacle across the space between them, laying the end of it over Steve’s hands in a way that seems like he’s expecting Steve to yank his hands away at any minute.

Steve looks down at it. It’s warm, in his hands, and heavy, and softer than he expected. He moves one hand over it, stroking it with his fingers. The feeling is like silk wrapped around steel, and the tip of the tentacle wriggles a little, as if it’s ticklish. Whatever coats the tentacle doesn’t come away on his fingers, but there’s almost no friction as his hand moves over it.

Bucky is completely still, and staring at Steve as if he can’t believe this is happening. He looks one breath away from panic.

Steve looks Bucky straight in the eyes, lifts the tentacle up, and presses it to his lips. “Still beautiful,” he says.

The sound of Bucky’s breathing, rasping and terrified, fills the room. The tentacle lifts itself out of Steve’s hands, and the tip traces down Steve’s cheek before Bucky brings it back to himself.

Steve licks his lips. There’s a residual sweetness there, and an echo of the sea.

“Um,” Bucky says. He’s staring down at his knees. “I’ll, uh, I’ll knock on your door before breakfast, okay?”

“Okay, Buck,” Steve says, getting up.

Something possesses him to run his fingers through Bucky’s wet hair as he passes. Bucky looks up at him, his eyes hunted.

“You got seaweed in your hair, you goof,” Steve smiles. His hand is still cupping the back of Bucky’s head.

“Can’t take me anywhere,” Bucky murmurs. His lips are parted slightly, in surprise.

“Goodnight, Buck,” Steve says. He takes his hand back and leaves, quickly, to his own cabin, before he can give in to the mad urge to press his own lips to Bucky’s, to see if they’d taste sweet, too.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this fic is coming pretty fast; I really did outline all of it when delirious with The Plague, and it’s easy to write something that mostly follows the plot of one of the films (in this case, TFA).
> 
> Couple notes on Ch1: the fic’s title is from the AIM song “Demonique”, which is quite fabulous and quotes whole swathes of Halloween I & II. All of that album — Cold Water Music — and its followup, Hinterland, are great.
> 
> Congratulations if you got the boy and the fish and the dog reference; if you didn’t, I suggest you look up the Book of Tobit which is hands-down one of the sweetest stories in the entire Judeo-Christian catalogue.
> 
> On Erskine: America’s immigration policy pre- and during World War 2 in regards to Jews was incredibly bigoted and anti-Semitic. It was horrifying. I’m reading Erik Larson’s In The Garden of Beasts, which touches on it in early chapters, and wow, the US let a lot of people die because we decided to be racist asshats.


	3. Chapter 3

Bucky continues to swim nearly every day as Italy approaches; he chooses strange times, once wandering off in the middle of a conversation. Steve doesn’t question it, as since their talk in Bucky’s cabin it’s like he’s gotten his friend back. Bucky has a casual physicality that thrills Steve: the way he’ll throw an arm over Steve’s shoulders as they’re walking, or stick his feet in Steve’s lap when he reads. He’s more careless with his tentacles, too. He doesn’t touch Steve with them again, but he doesn’t keep them away from him any more, either.

The swimming broadens Bucky’s human physique still further, packing more muscle across his chest and shoulders.

The crew of the ship are nervous the closer they get to Italy. The U-boats are kings in the Mediterranean and its approaches, and one in four Allied ships falls victim to them. There’s no way to fight back or avoid them, except in the unlikely event the sub is caught on the surface by the ship’s watch. Yet they reach Naples unbothered by submarines.

The crew praises their great good fortune, and Steve elbows Bucky and says, “That was a lucky strike, sneaking past the U-Boats.”

Bucky merely bows his head and smiles a private little smile.

Steve glances at him, a furrow of confusion between his brows. Then it clears. “Oh,” Steve says. “ _Oh_.”

Bucky grins at him then, gleeful and savage.

Steve finds himself staring at his friend, lips parted in surprise. Then he looks away, and coughs to cover the blush heating up his cheeks. Sometimes Bucky is so beautiful, he hurts to look at.

A day of truck travel later they’re at the forward operating base, waiting for cameramen. Army PR are arguing about whether Bucky should wear combats or something more in keeping with the Captain America uniform, and Bucky makes his Nick Charles face at Steve, and they both decide to go for a walk.

As they reach the center of camp, looking for the mess tent, Steve spots a couple of familiar figures through the open flap of a command tent: Peggy’s boss Colonel Philips, and Howard Stark. He tugs Bucky’s arm and heads into the tent: Peggy must be here! Bucky rolls his eyes, but follows.

Stark and Philips look up as Steve comes in. “Well, if it isn’t our super soldier,” Philips drawls. “What paperwork snafu sent you our way, Captain America? Or is the USO in town?”

Steve’s cheeks burn with shame. He ducks his head and rubs the back of his neck. “I was just, uh, wondering if Agent Carter was around?” he says.

Philips and Stark exchange A Look. Stark turns back to Steve and is about to open his mouth when Philips cuts him off. “Look, kid, I’m sorry.”

Terror clutches at Steve’s chest; the wood of Philips’ desk creaks under his white-knuckled grip.

“She was embedded with the 107th; they all got killed or captured by Hydra a few days ago, at Azzano,” Philips continues.

“Captured?” Steve says. “Aren’t you going to—“

Philips’ long sigh cuts him off. “We can’t just march a division 200 miles behind enemy lines. It’s taken us four months as it is to come 100 miles. Leave the soldiering to the soldiers, son.”

Steve looks at Bucky with wild eyes. Bucky looks to Heaven, and groans, and then just says “fine” before marching out of the tent in a huff. Steve hurries after.

Stark chases after them. “Steve, old bean! While you’re in town, I’d love to run a couple tests—“

Steve is about to round on Howard, his face clear how much he is done with everyone and everything, his anger clear in the tension in every line of his body. But just before the confrontation can occur, Bucky manages to interpose himself between the two men. He slings an arm around both of them and says, “Gentlemen, I think we all need to have a drink. Howard, you holding?”

“Pfft,” Howard says. “I have with me a brandy that was in Napoleon’s personal collection.”

Bucky wrinkles his nose. “Why didn’t he drink it then? Is it because it’s terrible?”

Steve is still vibrating with tension.

Howard stops and fixes Bucky with a look that is a mix of appreciation and horror. “Huh,” he says. “Let’s find out.” He guides the two of them into his tent, which is a maze-like affair of worktables piled high with various mechanical projects.

Howard stops in front of a particularly disordered table, and leans down to root around underneath it.

“Bucky,” Steve says, in a voice which is half pleading and half accusation.

“Trust me,” Bucky whispers, and puts a hand on Steve’s lower back, gently trying to rub away some of the tension there. His eyes, though, never leave Howard’s crouched form.

“Aha!” Howard says, and straightens up quickly. In his hands he’s not holding the expected bottle of hooch: no, he’s got a large metal disc, which he tosses at Steve. Steve catches it, startled, while Bucky steps away, jamming his hands into his pockets.

“What’s this?” Steve asks, annoyed.

“Thank you very much, Howard, for my new shield, which actually stops bullets and is made of vibranium, the rarest metal on earth. What a nice thing for you to do for me, Howard. I’m touched.”

“Thank you, Howard,” Steve parrots distractedly, as he turns the shield over in his hands.

“Y’know, Mister Stark, me and Steve were just discussing an opportunity to try this new toy out,” Bucky drawls. He pulls a bottle of whisky out from under a canvas tarp and waggles it at Howard.

“Oh?” Howard says.

“Sometimes a very small force can do things, unofficially, that a very big force can’t,” Bucky continues.

“Oh,” Howard says. “OHO.” He swipes the bottle from Bucky’s hands. “Come into my back office, gentlemen.”

“I mean, he’s going to do it anyway, and I’m duty-bound to follow him, but we could use transport,” Bucky says, as they follow Stark like a couple of ducklings into a curtained-off part of the tent that is marginally less messy than the front part.

* * *

That night Steve and Bucky find themselves in Howard Stark’s personal aeroplane, much further behind the German lines than good sense would dictate.

“Remember,” Howard says around the stub of a cigarillo, “I knew nothing about this, unless you’re successful, in which case I was the mastermind of the whole operation.”

Bucky laughs, but Steve is silent, tense, his focus unshakeable.

They parachute out over the Azzano Hydra base. Even this late at night, lights are still blazing there, and an eerie, flickering blue glow emanates from the windows of the largest factory building.

The guards never knew what hit them. There was the silent one, with the knives, that could just appear behind you and by the time you knew he was there you were already on your way to dead. There was the one in the bright flag uniform who used his shield as an offensive weapon, sending it flying across distances to snap necks and cave in chests.

By the time an alarm is tripped, Steve and Bucky have already released half the prisoners, who arm themselves as best they could from the dead guards. Hydra find themselves fighting a force of 200 and growing, rather than the two-man invaders.

But Hydra have the blue weapons.

The blue weapons that can cause someone to simply vanish, as if they never were. The blue weapons that cause fear even in Bucky’s eyes.

Bucky continues opening cells while Steve organizes the force they have, telling them to swarm around the Hydra forces, not giving them a single big target, and aim to capture and turn as many of the blue weapons as possible. A Frenchman offers demolition expertise and Steve hurriedly tells him to blow the factory.

Peggy is nowhere to be found, and Steve grows increasingly frantic. He doesn’t show it, but Bucky can tell, in the grit of his jaw and the tightness of his movements.

They press deeper. Peggy is in an interrogation room, chained to the wall. She is, thank God, alive and well but for a black eye, a broken nail and a torn stocking, and Steve rips the chains out of the wall with his bare hands before sweeping her into his arms.

“Steve,” Peggy says, “Zola and Schmidt are here. Leave me. Go after them.”

Steve hesitates, glancing over at Bucky.

“Steve, it’s an order. Put me down and let me organize the men. You must stop Schmidt.”

Steve puts her down, embraces her fiercely, and then runs further into the complex.

“You’re still here,” Peggy says.

“Like a bad penny,” Bucky shrugs.

They go out and Peggy immediately takes command of the Allied fighters, beating Hydra back until the factory blossoms into orange flame, which is when the remaining Hydra faithful drop weapons and flee.

“Steve,” Bucky breathes, and runs towards the explosion.

“Barnes!” yells Peggy. “What the hell are you doing?”

He doesn’t answer. There’s some sort of rocket taking off from one of the adjacent roofs, and Bucky grits his teeth, glances around, and steps Between. He’s on the roof in the next breath.

Steve is there, running after the rocket, preparing to leap onto it.

And he would have made it too, if the roof hadn’t collapsed under his feet. He mis-steps, and launches himself out into space, any chance of safe landing crumbling into the inferno of flames below him.

Bucky swears under his breath and leaps towards Steve. They crash into each other in a sloppy tackle as the updraft of heat below them singes their hair and clothing. Bucky shuts his eyes and goes Between again, and a moment later they’re rolling on the ground by the edge of the factory.

Steve sits up first. “Peggy,” he says.

“She’s fine,” says Bucky wearily, flat on his back. “We won, Steve. We fucking won.”

“Not yet,” Steve says. “We still have to get back to Allied base.”

* * *

They make it back, over 400 of them, to the cheers and awe of all the troops in base. The filmmakers who were there to shoot a PR film suddenly find themselves to be newsreel men, shooting a genuine victory of Captain America.

Philips looks like he doesn’t know whether to give them a medal or have them shot.

Stark is insufferably smug, but manages to find steak frites and beer for a welcome-home feast for all the prisoners, so everyone forgives him.

Peggy sweeps Steve and the leaders among the prisoners back to London for a full SSR debrief. Bucky is allowed to come too.

Steve is over the moon. He’s finally made a true difference to the war effort. Peggy looks at him with a newfound respect, as do the men he freed. He’s not a costumed monkey any more.

They all go out to celebrate in a pub their first night in London, the boys toasting Steve’s health. And then Peggy walks in, in her red dress, and the world stops for Steve.

He’s never seen a woman as perfect and beautiful as Peggy before. Less than 36 hours previously, she’d been chained up in a Hydra hellhole, but you’d never know from looking at her. There’s not a hair out of place. She joins him, and the rest of the room falls away.

They talk of everything and nothing, plans after the war, Peggy’s suggestion that Steve form and lead a small commando force for other such missions that a large force can’t do. Steve vaguely thinks that those were Bucky’s words, and then Peggy asks him about Bucky.

“He’s very charming, but rather shallow, isn’t he? Not the type I’d have picked out as your best friend,” Peggy muses. “How did you two get to be friends?”

“No,” Steve demurs, swirling his drink. How many has he had? It only took two _apfelschnapps_ to lay him out before, but he must have had ten whiskies and as many beers and he’s still as steady as a rock. “Bucky’s like an iceberg, Pegs. 90% of him is under the surface,” Steve says.

“Hm,” Peggy says.

It’s then that Steve looks around and notices that Bucky is gone. “I, I think I’m going to call it a night,” Steve says. He fumbles. Should he kiss her? On the cheek? Do people other than Howard Stark still kiss the back of a lady’s hand?

Peggy solves the issue for him by standing up on her tiptoes and brushing her lips over his cheekbone. “It _is_ getting late. Good night, Steve. Sweet dreams.”

When Steve gets back to the rooms he and Bucky are sharing, he finds his friend a small ball of tentacles shoved as far as it can go in the corner of his bed, writhing miserably in five dimensions.

Steve’s ocean of alcohol in his stomach briefly considers coming back up again. He sits down on his bed and starts to unlace his shoes. “You okay, Buck?”

 _Fine. I’m just… sad tonight_ , comes the voice in his head. It’s less startling now.

“Why are you sad, Buck?” Steve presses.

 _It’s just a general sad. Post-mission blues, I guess. I don’t have any reason to be sad, yet here I am_. The tentacles writhe again and yeah, the whisky makes a valiant effort to go backwards up Steve’s esophagus.

“Can you be sad in three dimensions?” Steve steps out of his trousers and folds them over a chair. His uniform shirt and tie follow quickly after.

_No. A proper sulk requires at least five dimensions. Possibly a pocket dimension too, to yell into._

Bucky stills as Steve’s weight settles on the edge of the mattress.

Steve sits on the edge of Bucky’s bed and looks at the mass of tentacles and gathers his courage. He’s never touched Bucky when he’s like this, and it’s a lot more than briefly holding a tentacle. Still, it’s so clearly what his friend needs.

He closes his eyes, leans forwards, and does his best to hug the ball of tentacles.

Bucky remains completely still. _Steve_ , he says.

“Please three dimensions only,” Steve says, his eyes still squeezed shut. “I want to hug you, but I don’t want to be sick on you.”

There are suddenly a lot more tentacles, under and around him. It’s like he started off trying to hug a large ball, and ended up in a nest instead. They smell nice, and they’re surprisingly comfortable. His arms are still buried in the main mass. It’s almost like being at sea, rocked gently on this ceaselessly moving, silken bed of tentacles.

“Feel better, Buck,” Steve says muzzily. Maybe the alcohol did affect him, a little bit, and he should roll off and go to his own bed but Bucky is warm and smells nice.

A heavy tentacle flops over him, the weight of it making him aware of how tense the muscles of his back are. He forces himself to relax. Another tentacle twines loosely around his wrist, the tip nudging into his hand.

Steve purrs contentedly, squeezes the tentacle in his hand, and falls asleep.

He wakes up the next morning in that state of having had so much good sleep that he’s a little dopey from it, half hard and not really sure where he is. He’s not on a nest of tentacles. The bed is empty; Bucky, from the sounds of it, is in the bathroom. Steve hears a razor being tapped against the side of the sink.

“You have to shave?” Steve calls out.

“Ugh,” Bucky says. “Bodies are annoying.”

Bucky comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later. He stands in front of Steve, awkward, and looks down at the floor. He’s hugging himself, arms tight around his sides. He’s in completely human form. “Uh, thank you for last night,” Bucky says. “I know it must not have been very nice for you.”

“Bucky,” Steve says. He reaches out and tugs Bucky’s arms, trying to loosen them from their tight wrap around his body. “It was fine. I slept the best I’ve slept since… a long time. Now put your uniform on, and let’s get some breakfast.”

* * *

The newly-minted Howling Commandos start going on their first missions. Steve is too aware of the fact that he’s an impostor, their leader only because of a fake serum and one lucky, demon-assisted break. He puts his all into making sure that he won’t let them down, won’t get his men killed. Even though his memory is damn near photographic, he stays up reviewing maps, intel and tactics late into every night. His new body’s great for that; he doesn’t need more than a couple hours of sleep a night. After missions, he runs the same thing backwards, looking at what happened, what he could have done better.

After their second mission, a real shitshow where they’d found horribly mutilated, dead Allied soldiers in a laboratory wing of a Hydra base, the weeks of self-imposed tension finally break him. One night when they’re still a day or two’s march from the nearest Allied FOB, Bucky comes off watch to find Steve in their tent, staring at their intel again, every muscle in his body locked tight, his breath as fast and hard as if he had just been in a fight. He’s in his boxers and undershirt, more than enough for a hot August night in Northern France.

Bucky cups Steve’s face in his hands, but Steve bats him away with a curt, “I’m fine.”

“Steve, you are _not_ fine and you’ve been progressively less fine for the past two weeks,” Bucky says, slipping out of his uniform. “You have to let this stuff go. You can’t be perfect.”

“I have to do better. I _chose_ to do this mission second,” Steve grits out. “If I’d done it first, maybe those soldiers would still be alive.”

“You can’t punish yourself for what we never knew was there, Steve,” Bucky says. “You picked this mission second because it was far more complex, and we needed a dry run to make sure we were working together as a team. It was the right choice.”

Steve shakes his head and hisses, “No. Those men died because of me.”

Bucky sits down on the bedroll next to Steve and slings an arm over his shoulders. “Christ, Steve, when did you last get any sleep?”

Steve flinches away. “Bucky… I just want to be alone. I have things to deal with, reports—“

“Horseshit,” says Bucky, standing. Then Bucky looks away, huffs out a frustrated breath, and says, “Fuck.”

Steve has learned that pattern of behaviour. It usually means Bucky’s come to a decision to do something he thinks won’t end well. “What,” Steve says.

Bucky glares at him, a face that looks like he’s spoiling for a fight, and then he rolls his shoulders. A dozen tentacles of varying sizes and lengths unfurl out of his back. “Do you trust me?” he asks.

Steve blinks at him, momentarily distracted by the sinuous movement of the newly-manifested appendages. “Bucky, what—“

“Yes or no. Do you trust me,” Bucky says, his voice flat.

“Yes,” Steve says.

Then suddenly Bucky’s in front of him, and Steve looks up at him from his seat on the bedroll, at this strange creature, cruel and beautiful. Pulse racing, he says, “What are you doing?”

“Put your hands behind your back, and hold your elbows,” Bucky says. He is completely still, like a statue, in nothing but his boxers, but his tentacles writhe, as if in anticipation.

Steve swallows, and complies.

Bucky walks around behind him. Steve is shivering now. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but the entire air of the tent is charged with a sort of electricity, as if they’re passing into another world. He hears Bucky fall to his knees behind him, and then there’s a strip of cloth being wrapped around his head, over his eyes, blindfolding him.

“What are you doing?” Steve whispers.

“It will help you relax,” Bucky says.

Steve’s whole body jerks, his heart thundering, as two tentacles wrap around his chest and arms, immobilizing them. He panics slightly and fights the binding, tries to move his arms. But the tentacles are like steel. He can’t. He _can’t_ move.

Bucky is making shushing sounds at him, and forcing him down onto his side. For the past few months, Steve has gotten used to being the strongest thing around by far, and it’s both terrifying and exhilarating to come up against an equal, and opposing, force. No, more than equal: Bucky is manipulating him as if he were still the 100-pound asthmatic who could barely make it through a Brooklyn winter, with unfathomable strength, and gentleness.

The big tentacles go round his legs next, once he’s on his side. Each leg is bent back so the heel almost touches his ass. A tentacle winds down each, and back up again, and then yet another tentacle weaves between the ones immobilizing his legs and the ones around his chest, bending Steve’s body backwards. That tentacle ends in a loose loop around Steve’s neck.

Steve can’t think. His brain whites out. He is uncomfortably aware of how, with his body arced back, the one unbound part of him — his cock and balls — is thrust forwards, on display. How there are two muscular tentacles wrapped hard around his groin; how his cock and balls hang heavy between them, brushing their silk-steel surfaces whenever he tries to move. How he’s getting hard.

“There,” Bucky breathes behind him, and Steve tries to move, tries to press himself towards that sound, but he can’t, he’s completely immobilized, and as he tries to fight the tentacles holding him the one around his neck tightens just slightly, in warning.

Steve struggles, heart pounding, breathless. He’s so hard, he’s dizzy, and this can’t be _right_ , this can’t be allowed, the things he _wants_ —

—and then it’s like he’s falling, his muscles go slack and he lets go, and everything goes fuzzy—

His dreams are confusing, that night, as he sleeps. The ocean, and Peggy, and Bucky, all in strange backwards fragments, but he feels good, for the first time in months he feels really great, and he’s so close to release, just a couple more thrusts, but he can’t see—

He pushes the blindfold off his eyes to find he’s lying on his side in Bucky’s tentacle-nest, thrusting between two thick, entwined tentacles, wet and shiny, and he sees his purple cockhead poke through the other side of them and that’s all it takes to put him over the edge, and he’s coming harder than he’s ever come in his life, watching as his white release splatters all over the grey surface of the tentacles, and it’s as if they know, and tighten over him, jerking him off gently through it, and the tip of one is pressing just under his balls and he feels like he’s going to fall apart with the force of his orgasm. His entire body is electric with it, his hands buried in masses of tentacles, gripping them, as his body thrusts and thrusts until finally the waves of pleasure stop coming and he slumps back into their silken embrace.

Steve lies there, completely spent, in the gently moving mass of tentacles, as he waits for the sparks to fade from his vision.

A tentacle brushes his hair away from his forehead. _Feel better?_ Bucky’s voice says, in his head.

And reality crashes in on Steve. What he’s done. What he’s _wanted_.

He springs off the bedroll, away from Bucky, and throws on his clothes. “I’m gonna—“, is all he manages, as he escapes the tent into the pre-dawn light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m going to hell.


	4. Chapter 4

That day’s march is a disaster. Steve takes point, anxious and brusque, setting a blisteringly fast pace, determined to make it back to the Allied FOB by nightfall. Bucky brings up the rear, his foul mood on display for all to see. The rest of the Commandos are strung out uncomfortably between them, their own personal Scylla and Charybdis.

It’s Falsworth who cracks first. “Looks like Mummy and Daddy have had a row,” he whispers.

“Which one of ‘em’s Daddy,” snorts DumDum.

“Pfft, c’est clair,” says Dernier.

He’s about to continue, but Gabe cuts him off. “Nobody should answer that on the basis that we’d all like to remain alive,” Gabe says. “Those two could hear a mouse fart from a mile off.”

Morita just hums thoughtfully, and glances back at Bucky.

They don’t make it back to the FOB; not even Steve can make fatigued soldiers cram two days’ march into one. The men beg Steve to make camp just before sunset, all exhausted from his double-speed pace. Steve agrees reluctantly. His displeasure only grows when he sees that Bucky has put up their tent, and is standing outside it, one eyebrow raised in challenge.

Steve smoothly turns on his heel and informs DumDum that he no longer gets a tent to himself; he’ll be sharing with Steve.

The Commandos all exchange furtive looks of shock. DumDum shakes his head. “Steve, ain’t no way two fellas of our size are gonna fit in a pup tent. I’ll go bunk with Barnes.”

“No,” says Bucky, behind them. His tone is sharp and final. “I have night terrors. Since Guadalcanal. I lash out. Steve’s the only one I’m safe to bunk with. I’ll… I’ll sleep on my own.” With that, he stomps back to his tent and disappears inside it.

The men exchange another glance. They’ve all witnessed firsthand their sergeant’s brutal hand-to-hand combat skills and nobody’s keen to accidentally end up on the wrong side of them. Monty, the only other commissioned officer in the group, suggests that for propriety’s sake that he bunk with Steve, and Morita, who he usually splits a tent with, can bunk with DumDum. They all turn in early though few sleep well, the camp unsettled, routines and habits broken. For soldiers are all creatures of habit… and superstition.

The next day is blisteringly hot. They make it to the Allied lines in six hours, every man of the Commandos dripping sweat and stripped down to shirtsleeves or undershirts except Monty, who still wears his whole uniform in some pointless display of upper-class Britishness. He’s flushed red as a tomato, though, and looks about three steps away from passing out.

The Commandos are halfway through camp on the way to their billets when Steve and Peggy spot each other. He exhales in relief as he dismisses his squad and strides over to her. He has the urge to sweep her up in a hug and then realises at the last minute that he’s sweaty and disgusting, and steps back so as not to ruin her immaculate blouse and skirt. “Pegs,” he sighs gratefully, taking her hand.

He turns his head at some commotion from the departing Commandos. “They’ve got showers here,” exults DumDum, having cornered a regular soldier. “There is a God and He still loves us,” sighs Monty, finally loosening his cravat. But Bucky is already past them, prowling away as if he’s on his way to a murder, muscular shoulders gleaming with sweat, grimy undershirt clinging to the broad planes of his back. Steve swallows, and forgets to look away…

…until there’s a sharp pain in his hand, which is still lifelessly holding Peggy’s.

“Sorry,” Steve says, turning back to Peggy. “Just making sure the boys are squared away.”

“Mm-hmm,” hums Peggy, stepping closer. Her gaze is steely. Her free hand fists in Steve’s shirt, dragging him down so she can speak into his ear. He goes automatically to move his head around so she’s not speaking into his deaf ear, until he remembers he doesn’t have to do that any more.

“Steve,” Peggy says, sotto voce, “If you want to use me as a beard so you can chase after Barnes, I’d like us to actually discuss it first.”

Steve tries to pull away. “No! Peggy, I don’t—” He shakes his head. “I’m not— I like _you_.”

Peggy’s eyes narrow. “You look at me like you want to put me on a pedestal and worship me. You look at _Barnes_ like you want to tear his clothes off with your teeth. Does he know?” Then Peggy drops his hand, her eyes widening and her fingers going to her perfectly-painted, carmine-red lips. “Dear God, you don’t realise, do you? What that feeling you have means, when you’re around him.”

Steve stutters. His blush roars across his cheeks; the tips of his ears growing so hot as to almost be aflame. He feels the ghost of tentacles around his legs, binding his thighs, brushing against his balls. He squeezes his eyes shut as a shudder of fear and desire runs through him. He digs his fingernails into his palm, trying to banish those memories.

Peggy smiles, and rests her hands on his fists, rubbing the back of his hands with her cool fingers. “Falling hard for someone isn’t a bad thing, Steve, even if it does blindside you. And honestly, many of Britain’s greatest military heroes loved other men. Listen to your heart. If it tells you to be with Barnes, you should try to make a go of it with him. Just... keep it quiet.”

Steve shakes his head and backs away. “No, Pegs, it’s not… it’s not that. It’s…”

“It’s what, then?” Peggy asks coolly, arching an eyebrow.

Steve backs into a nearby tent pole, which creaks worryingly, and covers his face with his hands.

It’s Bucky’s tentacles.

And how much he wants them in his body.

He thinks he must be _sick_ , the things he wants. It’s bad enough realizing that he wants men. Or, not _men_. _One_ man. But the rest… the fantasies of what he wants Bucky to do to him, fantasies that seem to get louder and more intrusive by the day, pushing into his thoughts, they’re _wrong_. In his shame and desperation, he latches onto the fact that Bucky is a demon, and half-convinces himself that Bucky twisted something within him, made his brain sick, as he transformed Steve’s body. Or perhaps Erskine had discovered a more fundamental truth than he’d imagined: that it is impossible to improve the body without ruining the mind.

“I just need some time to think,” Steve mutters, avoiding Peggy’s questioning gaze.

“Well, if you ever need to chat, my door is always open to you,” Peggy says, stepping forward to swiftly kiss Steve on his still-burning cheek. “Be well, Steve. And remember there’s a war on. None of us may have the luxury of tomorrows to work these things out.”

Steve flees to the showers, and sets the water on its coldest setting. It’s still not cold enough to knock him back to his senses, but it helps. He trudges to his tent, dirty clothes slung over his shoulder and a towel around his waist, wanting nothing more than to lie down and give his brain a rest.

He’s halfway inside before he sees Bucky sitting in the shadows, legs crossed Indian-fashion on the second cot.

“We need to talk,” Bucky says. “Steve, I’m sorry—”

Steve startles, and it’s enough to make all the shame and frustration that the shower had started to ease out of him come howling back. Steve throws the tent flap closed and strides over to Bucky, looming over him, fists balled. “What did you do to me?” Steve snarls. “In New York. In the laboratory. _What did you do_.”

Bucky looks up at him in confusion. He licks his lips, absently. “I made you perfect. And trust me, I know perfect,” he says, the edges of his mouth twisting in melancholy.

“What did you do to my _mind_?” Steve hisses.

“Nothing,” Bucky says. He shakes his head slightly, as if trying to clear it.

“I don’t believe you,” Steve says.

“I’m serious, Steve,” Bucky says, a flash of anger lighting his eyes with an eerie lavender glow. “I would _never_. It’s _forbidden_ to mess with anyone’s personhood, their mind. It’s— well, it’s supposed to be forbidden,” he says, trailing off, his attention catching on the rough khaki wool of the bedspread.

Steve turns away. He can’t look at Bucky. His stomach is a mess of fury and self-hatred and still, that goddamn twist, the burning low in his gut, that Bucky’s proximity causes. “Why are you here?” he says, despairing.

Bucky’s voice is perplexed as he answers. “I promised Erskine— you were there.”

Steve snorts. “Because demons are so well known for keeping their promises.”

He can see out of the corner of his eye as Bucky’s face shifts, into something sad.

“I missed helping,” Bucky whispers.

“What?” Steve says. Despite himself, he turns back towards his friend.

But Bucky won’t meet his eyes. He’s tracing patterns on the wool blanket with his fingers, and his voice is soft, and distant. “I was the one who would be sent down here, more often than not. Many of the others were not interested in the humans, or were... temperamentally unsuited to dealing with them. Me, I was curious. More than the others. He said His hand slipped when He made me, and that’s why I was odd. But I _liked_ it here, among you all. Liked _helping_. I thought I could do it again.” Bucky hangs his head and whispers, “I’ve obviously lost the knack for it.”

Bucky gets up. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again,” he says. He bumps past Steve as he makes his way out of the cramped tent, and when his bare shoulder brushes Steve’s, it’s the most alive Steve has felt all day.

Bucky doesn’t return. Not that night, not the next. He’s still in camp; Steve will see him occasionally across mess halls, or slumped in shadows in the back of a briefing. But Steve has no idea where Bucky is sleeping, and he doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t sleep, either. He blames the noise of camp, but the noise in his head is louder by far.

They keep their distance. It’s easy; Philips is planning their most ambitious mission yet: attacking a mountaintop castle on the Franco-German border, where Hydra allegedly keep occult artifacts. The castle is ancient, and supposedly impregnable.

Steve fills the hours of non-sleep with going over the castle’s plans, looking for ways to stage an impossible break-in. He has half a dozen harebrained ideas and expounds them all to Colonel Philips and Peggy, a few days later in Philips’ tent.

Philips waves a hand, stopping Steve in mid-flow about the slight potential that they could parachute in and land on the castle’s vertiginously steep roof.

“Barnes says there’s a tunnel,” Philips rumbles.

Steve blinks, his expression pinching. “You’ve been talking to Bucky?”

Philips’ bushy eyebrows raise infinitesimally. “You haven’t?” he counters.

“We’ve both been so busy,” Steve begins, but stops as he glimpses Peggy over Philips’ shoulder. She’s looking heavenward and shaking her head in exasperation, her curls swinging slightly.

“Well, newsflash, your Indiana redneck of a sergeant claims with absolute certainty that halfway up that mountain in a country he’s never been to, there’s an old tunnel that links into the castle’s cellars. But he can’t explain how he knows this. And the whole subject has me a mite confused, you could say,” Philips says, his tone as dry as the Texas high plains in summertime.

Steve exhales. “If Bucky says there’s a tunnel, there’s a tunnel.”

“Okay,” says Philips, in a way that suggests he is in no manner all right with this answer.

“Where is it? The tunnel,” Steve says.

Philips pushes the castle map towards Steve. There’s a pencilled annotation to it, in Bucky’s neat handwriting.

“Then that’s our plan,” Steve says. He rolls up the map and tucks it under his arm. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

“On your head be it,” Philips grumbles.

“Good luck, Steve,” Peggy says.

* * *

The Commandos are flown over Alsace in the depths of night in Howard’s plane. Howard’s cheerful, bright chatter engages most of the Commandos.

 _Most_ of them.

Except for Bucky, who sits apart from all of them in the shadows at the back, silent and distant and terrifyingly focused.

And Steve, who sits closest to Howard, frazzled on a week of no sleep, unable to concentrate on what anyone is saying. He keeps glancing back, ostensibly to check on his team, but his eyes invariably travel to the man in the shadows, the hard planes of him, the haunted eyes. Weary and brooding, Bucky looks more like a picture-book devil than he ever has. And then Steve suddenly realises that Bucky’s been holding his human form for a week now. Without Steve, without the protection of someone who knows his secret, he would never be able to relax. 

Bucky would never be able to _sleep_ , for fear of slipping unconsciously into his demonic form. And yet he still stayed, where he could see Steve, where he could protect him.

Steve’s mind churns, guilty and conflicted, as he glimpses the suffering he must have unwittingly forced on his friend. Then they’re at the drop zone and Bucky has jumped out into the night before Steve can think what to say to him.

Steve is so out of it, he almost steps out the door of the plane without a parachute, but DumDum cries out “whoa, Steve,” and shoves one into his arms right before the jump.

They land in a forest a few miles from the castle. Bucky nips at their heels, hissing at the men to hurry up and stow their parachutes, eyeing them for any signs of injury from the jump, checking that Dernier’s crate of explosives landed safely. Then he slinks away into the darkness, off to recce a campsite. By the time they hiked to the castle from the drop area, it would be dawn. The op has to go down the next night, and in between, a dangerous day of lying low on German soil and praying they didn’t get discovered by a Nazi patrol.

Bucky slinks back a short while later and beckons them. The Commandos fall into line behind him, with occasional muttered swearing about Bucky being a damn cat who could see in the dark, as Gabe discovers a protruding tree root by tripping over it and nearly falling flat on his face.

Steve brings up the rear, but he’s not alone for long. DumDum and Monty corner him. “With permission, sir,” Monty begins, but DumDum cuts him off. “Cap, what the _fuck_ is going on with you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dugan,” Steve grits out.

“You’re a mess, that’s what I’m talking about. An’ I got a girl back in Ithaca and if I die tomorrow I don’t want it to be because my CO is nodding off at the wheel,” DumDum growls.

“If there’s anything we can do to help, sir, please let us know,” says Monty, more diplomatically. “We’re all worried.”

“I’m fine,” says Steve.

“You _forgot a parachute_ ,” grumbles DumDum.

Steve sighs. “I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“So we all hope,” says Monty, leading a glowering DumDum away by the elbow.

Steve gets to a small clearing to find four tents up, and Bucky leaning branches and torn-up shrubs against them to camouflage them.

“No fires, kids,” Bucky whispers. “I’m taking watch until morning. Get sleep,” he says.

The men grunt and mumble their assent and disappear into three of the tents. Sleep is precious, in their line of work, and nobody’s going to refuse it when offered.

Steve just stands there, swaying slightly, a film of nervous jitters thinly papering over a vast pit of exhaustion. There’s a restless fire under his skin and he doesn’t know how to get rid of it. His brain churns with guilt, fear and responsibility and he can’t let any of it go. He knows he’s not in his best fighting shape. He knows he’s letting his men down — hell, they’d told him, and though the Commandos are never backwards about coming forwards, that degree of insubordination is unheard of. He can’t blame them, though, because he could see the genuine fear and concern in DumDum’s eyes.

And he knows how he can fix it.

Bucky locks eyes with him across the clearing. There’s something predatory in his look, his stance. In the absolute stillness of him.

Steve shuts his eyes and swallows.

And he gives in to his sickness.

He walks up to Bucky, and in that moment, the clouds part and the moonlight filtering through the trees bathes Bucky in dappled silver, and Bucky is looking at him, eyes wide, unsure what’s going on, and he’s so beautiful, something shatters inside Steve.

He stutters out, “I need—“ and extends his forearms to Bucky. He licks his lips and presses his wrists together, as if they were tied, as if he were Bucky’s prisoner.

Bucky’s eyes sweep down to Steve’s wrists, then up to Steve’s face, taking in his blown pupils, his shallow, fast breath. And then in an instant, Bucky is in motion, his hand clamping around Steve’s wrists, his other hand at the small of Steve’s back, shoving him into the last empty tent, pushing him down onto his hands and knees.

“Strip,” Bucky orders.

Steve complies, fire already running through his body in anticipation. He shoves the awkward, gaudy uniform top over his head and is halfway through fighting the tights down over the thick muscles of his thighs when he sees Bucky’s jacket and shirt hit the ground in a tangled mess, and then Bucky _moans_ in relief as tentacles unravel from his back.

“The others—” Steve gasps, as he struggles to get his boots and tights off in one go.

Steve’s body jerks involuntarily as a tentacle wraps itself around his neck. The weight of it, the passive strength of it, already start to calm him.

“I’ve dropped a cone of silence over us. You can howl your lungs out and no-one will ever hear,” says Bucky, his voice husky.

And something in Steve curls up happily and wags its tail that he’s made Bucky sound that wrecked with desire. He looks up, in time to see Bucky easing his boxers over a very impressive, erect cock, and then that tentacle around his neck has its tip at his cheek, turning his face away, pressing his chest down onto the bedroll spread out over the ground.

“Press your forearms together in front of your chest, as if in prayer,” Bucky says.

Steve complies, and immediately there are tentacles wrapping around him, binding him. His arms are pressed against his chest, and those silky, massively strong appendages immobilize his upper body, shoulders and arms, leaving only his pecs and nipples exposed. The rub of them against the rough bedroll is almost more than he can stand.

The tentacles bind his legs next, though not as before. This time they hook around his knees and weave into the wraps up near his shoulders, effectively keeping his thighs spread almost to the point of discomfort, and his knees drawn up under him.

And once again, Steve is acutely conscious of what is unbound: his ass, stuck up in the air, and his hardening cock, dangling between widely-spread legs.

A last tentacle wraps around his eyes. Steve welcomes the darkness. He feels less ashamed when he can’t see. He knows it’s illogical, but logic walked out of his life back when Erskine led him into a tool shed and summoned a demon, and he’s slowly learning to roll with it.

“Can you break free?” Bucky asks.

Steve tenses his muscles and struggles. As he fights, the tentacles contract. Every time he thinks he finds a way to move, it’s cut off, as the silk-steel living cables binding him grow tighter.

Finally he gives up. “I can’t,” Steve sighs. His muscles go limp, shaking in the aftermath of his struggle. He feels floaty, as if he’s moving sideways, drifting, although he’s just proven that he can’t move at all.

He’s dizzyingly hard. He can’t even push his hips forwards, the way he’s bound, cheek mashed into the bedroll, chest too, his most intimate areas pushed up and spread out for Bucky to see.

“Do you need more, baby?” Bucky murmurs.

Steve isn’t quite sure what _more_ means, his head is too fuzzy, but then a tentacle tip ghosts down Steve’s ass crack and circles his hole. Steve jerks like he’s being electrocuted and comes in sudden, hot, surprising spurts, something between a yelp and a moan escaping his lips.

A tentacle tip pushes into his mouth, quieting him, and Steve groans around it, sucking on it eagerly. It has the same faint, sweet nectar taste that he remembers from the first time he’d dared touch one of Bucky’s tentacles on the ship, and as Steve runs his tongue over it he hears Bucky make a little kitten noise. That breaks Steve more, that this is giving Bucky pleasure, so he nods, _yes more_ , because he is stripped down, raw and shivering with pure need. He’s hard again almost immediately. 

His old body would have been done for the night after coming once, if in fact the act of orgasm didn’t send him into an asthmatic fit. Now, it barely seems to take the edge off.

Tentacles move around his balls and cock, and Steve tries to jerk his hips forwards, but he can’t. “Steve,” Bucky breathes in his ear, and Steve can feel Bucky’s human chest draped over him, feel his hands stroking Steve’s pecs, pinching his nipples. Steve moans again around the tentacle filling up his mouth. He’d been denying himself this, and though everything is a bit blurry at the moment, he can’t remember why.

Bucky’s voice rasps out. “Steve, _god_ , you need it so much, don’t you, baby? I think you need my tentacles to make you come, what, three more times? And if you’re a good boy, after that, I’ll finish you one last time on my cock. What do you think of that? Fighting Hydra tomorrow with my come dripping down your leg under your uniform. Nod if you want that.”

Steve, eyes weeping, lips stretched around the tentacle in his mouth, nods.

“If at any point you want me to stop, just bite down on the tentacle in your mouth. You can’t hurt me, but I’ll know to stop immediately. Nod again if you understand that,” Bucky says.

Steve tries to say yes around the appendage filling up his mouth, then remembers that’s not what he’s supposed to do, and nods instead.

“Good boy,” says Bucky, skritching his fingers through Steve’s hair.

Steve feels a smaller tentacle wrap all the way around his cock, sheathing it. Another small tentacle slithers down his ass crack to his hole, not penetrating it, though Steve realises he’s desperate for that to happen, desperate to be filled up the way his mouth is, stretched and drooling. He wants to push back against that tentacle that’s just rubbing the tight ring of muscle around his hole, but he can’t.

The tentacle around his cock starts to jerk him off, alternating tension around its loops to hit sweet spots Steve wasn’t even aware he had. The one at his ass doesn’t do enough. It’s just circling and pressing, like it’s getting him used to it’s presence, and that’s not what he wants at all. He tries to growl his discontent but it just comes out as unintelligible moans.

Steve feels Bucky’s war-calloused hands on his flanks, pressing, stroking, and that human connection, at the same time he’s being nearly violated by tentacles in every orifice he has, makes him even more dizzy and blurry. With his eyes covered, everything is sensation, overwhelming sensation, with no forewarning where Bucky will touch him, where pleasure will explode through him next.

“Ssh, baby,” Bucky says. “I know I’m moving too slow for you.”

Steve nods, and then groans around the obstruction in his mouth as he feels the tentacle move away from his ass.

He nearly chokes, though, when he feels two more tentacles pull the cheeks of his ass apart, and then Bucky’s tongue licking a hot stripe over his hole.

Bucky kisses it next, and murmurs, “I know you need a lot more, baby, but I want the first thing in your ass to be my tongue.”

The tentacle around his cock writhes, and begins tugging Steve off in earnest, and then Bucky sticks his tongue in Steve’s ass and Steve can feel the orgasm unspooling in his gut, fast and hot, and Bucky is licking and kissing and stabbing his tongue into Steve’s most intimate area and the tentacle over his cock contracts hard and twists and Steve lets go, and comes again, and he knows he’s coming all over a tentacle or two because he can feel the tip of one right under the sensitive rim of his cockhead and he bites down on the tentacle in his mouth just a little because it’s all too sensitive, he just needs a moment. True to his word, Bucky stops, the tentacles unraveling from around his cock, the oral assault on his ass stopping, and finally, the tentacles removing themselves from around his eyes and from in his mouth.

Steve opens his eyes to see Bucky’s face, eyes wide with concern. A tentacle strokes his cheek. “Are you okay, baby?” Bucky says. “Do you want me to let you go?”

Steve shakes his head. “N-no,” he breathes. “W-want more… just… need a moment…”

“Okay, baby,” Bucky says. A smaller tentacle eases itself down between them, and Steve can see in the glow of its phosphorescent spots his own come, dripping down it. He whimpers, involuntarily. It’s the sexiest thing he’s ever seen.

Until Bucky opens his mouth and sucks Steve’s come off his own tentacle.

Steve forgets he’s tied up for a moment, and tries to grind down, to get some friction on his cock, which is aching with need again.

Bucky laps one last, long stripe up his tentacle, then licks his lips and swallows. He grins at Steve. “Can I fuck you, baby?” he asks.

Steve nods, pupils blown black with desire.

“What do you want?” Bucky says, slipping a hand under Steve’s chest and rubbing the nub of one of Steve’s nipples between his deft fingers. “My tentacles, or my cock?”

“T-tentacles,” Steve moans. Then, in case Bucky didn’t get the message, he closes his eyes and opens his mouth.

Bucky growls, and quickly re-covers Steve’s eyes. Steve feels an even fatter tentacle press its tip into his mouth, and he sucks down on it, taking as much in as he can. He’s floating, chasing nothing but his own pleasure, and it’s selfish and illicit and so, so magnificent.

The tentacles around his knees force his legs open a little wider. Bucky still has a hand on his flank, connecting them, and Steve tries to breathe but the anticipation is killing him. He moans in frustration, but then it’s cut off as the questing tip of one of Bucky’s smaller tentacles presses inside the tight ring of muscle in his ass.

Steve bucks as much as he can in his bindings. There’s a slight burn as the tentacle works its way inside his ass, and it’s not enough, it’s still too slow, and Steve growls around the tentacle in his mouth.

Bucky tsks, and mutters, “so greedy, my boy, so good to me” and that praise makes the obedient little thing in Steve wag its tail again and roll over and show its belly.

A second small tentacle pushes into him, twining round the first. It’s still not enough, Steve doesn’t feel full the way he wants to, but the two appendages writhe within him, stretching him, and then one hits the right part of him—

—and Steve screams, blindsided by the near-orgasm levels of pleasure coming from a part of him he didn’t know existed.

“Yeah, there it is,” Bucky murmurs.

Steve’s cock hangs heavy and hard between his legs, his balls already tight up against him, and he’s pathetically grateful Bucky isn’t also touching him there because it’s _too much_ , now that Bucky’s worked out the place inside him the two tentacles twist and rub over it again and again, and the intrusion in him doesn’t even burn any more, it just feels good, and he loses track of time, floating on the sensations being manipulated from his body, until one particularly hard twist inside him sends him over the edge. It surprises him, that he’s suddenly coming, his cock twitching, and he comes back to awareness as he feels a tentacle wrap around his dick, gentling him through the sensation. The tentacles in his ass have stilled, and withdraw carefully. He immediately misses them and shakes his head, mumbling his unhappiness around the living gag in his mouth.

“Patience,” Bucky says. “You don’t know how beautiful you look, lips and ass stretched over my tentacles. You’re lucky I have some self-control because it would be so easy to lose myself in you, just to take what you want to give me and then some,” he continues, his voice rough and shaking. A hand grips Steve’s ass. “And I am going to stretch you, baby boy. You want that, don’t you? You still need more.”

Steve nods vigorously.

“Do you think you’re ready?” Bucky says, the hand on Steve’s ass stroking now, softly, affectionately. “Or do you need more time to recover?”

Steve pushes the tentacle out of his mouth. “I’m ready, sir,” he husks out, his voice gravelly. If he weren’t so fuzzy, maybe he would have admitted to himself that he wasn’t _quite_ ready, but he’s Steve Rogers and never in his life did he ever admit he wasn’t ready for something. Besides, nothing they’d done so far had been challenging. Pleasurable, yes, but he felt like Bucky was going easy on him. Too easy.

And then something huge presses at his entrance. And Steve realises that maybe, just maybe, he’s dreadfully underestimated Bucky.

Steve didn’t really think how much the big tentacle would be different from the smaller two, but it’s so much bigger, as fat as the one that had been in his mouth, and as it pushes slowly into him he keens his need, because finally, _finally_ he’s being filled up like he wants.

It’s _so_ big. It burns on the way in, and feels like it’s rearranging his insides, pushing everything out of the way to make space for itself. Every movement of it rubs hard against the bundle of nerves inside him, and it all combines with the painful stretch and the feeling of fullness to set Steve on fire. Every possible erogenous zone in his body, cock, nipples, neck, everything is tingling in sympathetic reaction, getting aroused just off the movement of air around him.

The tentacle stills inside him. Steve’s mouth hangs open, his breathing ragged, as his body accommodates the giant intrusion. It’s painful and strange and he’s never felt so complete in his life. He can feel it behind his eyes, the fluttering of ecstasy.

He swallows, and bites his lip. And throws down the metaphorical gauntlet. “I thought you said you were going to fuck me, sir.”

The only warning Steve gets is an inhuman growl, torn from somewhere deep within Bucky.

And then that giant tentacle is pulled halfway out of Steve and shoved back in.

Steve howls, in surprise and pleasure, riding the delicious edge of fear as he is reminded once again that Bucky is nowhere near human, that he’s an insanely strong supernatural creature that can overpower him effortlessly.

The pace Bucky sets up is brutal, fucking into Steve so hard that he’d be shoved up the bedroll if it weren’t for how firmly the rest of Bucky’s tentacles were binding him. Steve turns his head and just pants, just trying to hang on to the Earth and not float away. He’s aware of the tip of a tentacle brushing against his lips, and knows that it’s an out Bucky is giving him if it gets to be too much. He just has to bite.

And it _is_ too much. Steve squeezes his eyes shut and goes limp as a rag doll, just letting Bucky pound into him, and trying to manage the sensations that it’s sending crashing through his body. He tries to picture it, he knows how big Bucky’s largest tentacles are, the dappled phosphorescence and the slick, wet grey thickness of it, stretching his ass to breaking point, invading him.

It’s this image that makes him come what he thinks is his final time, his cock only able to spurt out a few dribbles as his body just melts into jelly, boneless and fucked-out. He’s saying things, but they’re not words, just sounds, so gone is he into sensation.

Bucky slowly pulls that big tentacle out of his ass, then Steve feels the rest of the bindings around him loosen too, the tentacles manipulating his limbs and massaging the cramped muscles as they release him. He doesn’t even have time to sag, because Bucky is already gathering him up softly in his tentacles, easing Steve onto his side and into Bucky’s embrace, until Steve’s back is pressed against Bucky’s chest and he’s cradled in muscular arms and glowing, silk-steel tentacles. Steve is still shaking, each quiver through his body like a little afterglow of orgasm, like a spark disturbed from slumbering ashes.

His body doesn’t quite feel like his own, uncoordinated and distant. He feels so good, and weightless, and safe in Bucky’s embrace, but one thing is missing. He fumbles for the nearest tentacle and covers his eyes with it. “Please,” he mumbles.

“Not ready to face the world yet?” Bucky whispers.

“Mm-mm,” Steve says.

“Okay. I’ve got you,” Bucky says.

Steve snuggles his ass further into Bucky’s crotch and then freezes. “You’re still hard,” Steve mumbles. “You didn’t come.”

Bucky strokes Steve’s stomach with his fingers, playing with the light dusting of hair there. “It’s okay, baby.”

“But—“

“Steve, I’m an eons-old being. Trust me to be able to judge my own pleasure. I got… a _lot_ out of working on you tonight. I am beyond content,” Bucky hums.

“Fuck me, please,” Steve breathes. “You said you’d finish me on your cock if I was a good boy. Please,” he whines. “Was I not good?”

“You were so good,” Bucky says. “And I can’t deny you anything. But you’re spent, baby. Don’t push yourself. You don’t have to.”

Steve half-whines and half-growls. “I can go again. You _promised_.”

Bucky sighs into the back of his neck. “What am I going to do with you?” He breathes.

“You promised,” Steve repeats.

“Okay,” Bucky says, a tentacle stroking down Steve’s thigh, gentling him. “But we’ve done a lot for your first time, so we’re just going to have lazy sex like this, okay?”

“Mmhmm,” Steve hums, grinding his ass back onto Bucky’s rock-hard dick.

Then Steve feels tentacles spreading him again and Bucky’s hand letting go of his stomach and moving behind him. He sighs in relief as a blunt pressure pushes against the still-loose muscle of his asshole.

Bucky’s cockhead pops in easily, Steve’s ass taking it like it was welcoming a long-lost lover. Then the rest of him eases in until Steve can feel Bucky’s soft, wiry pubic hair pressing against his rim. The feel of Bucky’s cock, the texture of it is so unlike the smoothness his tentacles, Steve gasps.

Bucky makes a small sound, half-hiss, half-moan, and Steve cranes his head to look at his lover.

Bucky’s eyes are glowing. If Steve ever doubted the man fucking him was a demon, the look of savage lust on his face and the glowing violet eyes would be enough to chill even the stoutest of hearts.

But Steve is sick, and seeing Bucky like that only makes a fresh wave of desire crash over him. He clenches his ass down on Bucky’s cock and groans, “Use me.”

Bucky’s hand clamps down on Steve’s hip with a grip so hard it’s painful. But then the grip loosens, and Bucky’s fingers drum softly over the silky curve of skin under Steve’s hip point.

He moves then, and it’s not at all what Steve was expecting: rather than the rough fuck he’d been hoping for, Bucky just rocks his hips gently into Steve, barely moving his cock in and out an inch.

At first Steve feels a low burn of frustration, but then he’s overcome, suddenly, by the intimacy of what they’re doing. Bucky’s gentleness, the warmth of the arms and tentacles embracing him. The light, comfortable slide of Bucky’s cock over the bundle of nerves inside him, just enough to fill him with a sparking warmth, like champagne bubbles coursing through his veins, not enough to overwhelm.

Some last tightly-wound thing in Steve finally lets go, and he becomes aware first that there’s wetness on his cheeks, and then that he’s crying, and he can’t stop, because it’s so _much_ , nobody’s ever cared about him like this before, nobody’s seen beyond his wall of bravado to the desperate, touch-starved need underneath. Nobody’s ever answered his “I can take anything” like Bucky has, with a “Yes, but you don’t have to.”

Steve shudders and comes, his cock dribbling out a bare few drops, his ass clenching down on Bucky’s dick. And then he can feel Bucky coming too, hot spunk filling his channel, warming him still further, the smell of brimstone filling the air, and he keeps shuddering, a wanton moan tearing out of him, as it pushes him to a fifth orgasm, a new wave of pleasure crashing over the last one before that one has even receded.

Bucky pulls him tighter to him, the tentacle across his eyes uncovering them as it moves to brush the wetness away from his cheeks. Bucky whispers sweet nothings in his ear, telling him how beautiful he is, how good he is. He can feel Bucky softening inside him and he frowns, he doesn’t want that connection to go, he doesn’t want to be empty ever again.

Bucky seems to sense this, because he removes his left hand from Steve’s chest and then wiggles his fingers. There’s a bright little spark of magic, and something silver appears in Bucky’s hand, bulbous at one end and flared at the other.

“Here,” Bucky murmurs, the hand disappearing from Steve’s view. Steve feels it reappear between the cheeks of his ass, just as Bucky’s soft cock slips out of him. There’s a slight pressure against his ass, and then Steve gasps as the head of the silver thing pushes past the loose ring of muscle and seats itself inside. It’s warm, and his brain fixates on that, how metal should be cold, but this is warm. He can still feel Bucky’s come inside him, plugged up, and he sighs in relief.

Bucky snuggles back against him. “I’m serious,” he whispers into Steve’s ear. “We’re going up against who knows what from the supernatural world — _my_ world — tomorrow night. And I am damn sure that you’re going to smell like my come, so if anything gets the bright idea to hurt you, they’ll know what they’re messing with. What will come after them and tear them limb from limb if they try. You are _mine_.”

Steve shivers again, the possessiveness in Bucky’s voice fighting its way past the heaviness in his eyelids to send one last thrill through him before he drifts off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

* * *

Weak sunlight filters through the canvas walls of the tent. Steve jolts awake, certain he’s supposed to be somewhere, and then realises he’s already there: behind enemy lines, killing time until darkness to attack an impregnable mountaintop castle filled with the worst of Hydra’s occult experiments.

The restlessness under his skin is gone. There’s nothing left but power and clarity.

He sits up and the plug in his ass shifts, sending an aftershock of erotic pleasure through his body. The events of the night come flooding back to him and suddenly he’s acutely aware of his nakedness, how the cool morning air is making his nipples erect, how the rough wool blanket feels against his sensitive cock.

He looks around for Bucky, because the last thing he remembers is Bucky all around him, cocooning him in his tentacles, in his affection.

For a moment he thinks Bucky’s not in the tent.

But no. Bucky’s there too, eyes wide, pressing himself into the shadow of the furthest corner of the tent from the flap, tentacles tucked behind his back.

Steve’s brow furrows and then he realises: Bucky is keeping as far away from him as possible, giving Steve unobstructed space to get up and leave.

Steve stares at him, and Bucky stares back, and Steve’s stomach does that odd topsy-turvy thing it does when he sees Bucky.

And Steve realises what that thing is.

It’s love.

And before he can overthink it, he’s lunging forwards, pressing his lips to Bucky’s, and Bucky gives a little moan of surprise and opens his mouth and then they’re kissing properly. It’s the one thing they haven’t done yet, a last bridge of intimacy that Steve knows he can never come back from.

Steve loses himself in the kiss, as Bucky pulls him closer, onto his lap, his tentacles relaxing from their exile and resuming their rightful place around Steve.

Steve knows it’s patently insane, falling in love with a demon, and that he has no name for what they do together in the night, that if he tried to explain it to anyone it would sound sick and twisted, but he learns that he can no longer question something that makes him feel so good, so alive, and which is done with such love.

But most of all, Steve learns that Bucky’s lips do taste just as sweet as his tentacles.

Steve knows he’s going to have to taste them every day from now on, just to make sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *relaxes in the porn dumpster while blowing smoke rings* welcome to my humble abode, friends, make yourself at home
> 
> This fic looks like it’s going to be six chapters in total. The next two are all outlined, except for the slight problem that I keep adding bits. Dammit, Chapter Five, stop growing!
> 
> Up next: Hydra castle assault! More Howling Commandos! Inconvenient suspicions from others about Bucky’s true nature! Some untruths revealed!


	5. Chapter 5

They will leave at sunset to attack the Nazi castle, with its rumored hoard of occult objects. Bucky grows quieter as the afternoon shadows lengthen, and Steve watches with fascination as this gentle, wounded, considerate creature shifts himself into something silent and terrible.

As the low sun turns the sky pink and orange, Bucky slings on the blue coat that the propaganda film people gave him back when this was all a pantomime. Then he begins pulling weapons out of his backpack.

Weapons that Steve has never seen before.

First is a knife. Bucky has always been fond of blades. Combined with his ability to move in supernatural silence, they have meant the end of many a Nazi guard. But the one coming out of his bag now is about three times as long as his usual. Hell, Steve thinks, it’s practically a _sword_. He opens his lips to say something, but is stilled by Bucky’s pale gaze. Bucky smirks and straps the long knife to his leg. “Back to what I know best,” he whispers.

Then come pistols with strange, long barrels, the hilts covered in runes. Finally, grenades, and a new rifle, strapped across his back. Bucky sees the question in Steve’s face, and mutters, “if you’re wondering where I was last week, the answer is mostly with Howard.”

“I’m sorry—“ Steve says, stepping forwards, his hand curling around the back of Bucky’s neck.

“Ssh, it’s okay,” Bucky says, brushing his lips against Steve’s. “It’s okay.” Bucky’s fingers trace down Steve’s broad back, moving inwards over flanking muscles to the low valley of his spine, and then lower still. He presses against the plug still in Steve’s ass, tilting it just so, and Steve rubs his face into Bucky’s neck, gasping at the stimulation. “Time for this to come out, I think,” Bucky murmurs.

Then Bucky’s long fingers are moving around, worming their way under the hidden waistband of Steve’s uniform trousers, unhitching them, rolling them down. Steve can feel the blood rushing towards his cock, how it fattens as the fabric around it is drawn over his thighs.

Bucky moves around behind him and kneels, spreading Steve’s ass. Steve shuts his eyes, expecting warm fingers to grasp the base of the plug.

But instead it’s rough stubble and soft lips, as Bucky bites the bottom of the plug with his teeth. Steve whimpers, his body jolting, and he feels more than hears the low chuckle that earns him from his demon lover. There’s a slight lance of pain as the bulb of the plug pulls out, then nothing but a feeling of emptiness, and wetness.

Bucky stands, still behind Steve, rolling up Steve’s trousers again from where they were bunched around his long thighs. His fingers trace over Steve’s half-erection and Bucky groans, cupping it, and grinding his own hard cock into Steve’s now-clothed ass. Steve leans into it, rubbing his back against Bucky’s broad chest like a cat desperate for affection.

Bucky nips at Steve’s neck, growling, “After, baby. After.”

Steve sighs, nodding. He turns, kisses Bucky one last time, hard and filthy and full of promise, then wipes his lips on his sleeve and strides out of the tent.

* * *

The tunnel is exactly where Bucky said it would be, halfway up the back face of the mountain. Steve wants to ask him about it, how he knew, but now is not the time. The Howlies are still nervous with adrenaline, having ghosted past two Nazi patrols at the base of the mountain. Nobody had wanted to alert the castle by killing them and causing a patrol check-in to be missed.

Now the men huddle on a narrow ledge, watching as Steve puts his shoulder to the giant boulder blocking the tunnel entrance. With a grunt and a flex of super-powered muscles, Captain America shifts the stone. Not far — too far and it would fall off the ledge, tumbling down the slope to the forest below. But far enough for a man to slip past, if he turns sideways. Dugan has to suck in his gut, and Dernier passes his backpack of explosives through ahead of him, but they make it.

The tunnel beyond has nothing special about it: rough-hewn stone walls, faintly damp and smelling of decaying roots. Yet there is something intangible about its atmosphere, a chill in the air, that causes the hairs on the back of the Allied soldiers’ necks to rise. They can’t risk lanterns — who knows what patrols these corridors — and the dark is oppressive with evil possibilities.

The corridor ends in an old, rusted-shut oak and iron door. The men draw their weapons as Steve unslings his shield. The last thing Steve hears before he charges into the door shield-first is the long hiss of Bucky’s blade being unsheathed.

The door falls down with a crash, and a German in a lab coat looks up and screams. Steve, Monty, Gabe, Dugan and Morita charge in, shooting first and asking questions later, while Bucky covers Dernier and the explosives in the doorway.

The surprised Nazis don’t stand a chance. Once the stone walls stop echoing with the sounds of violence, the Howlies find themselves in a chamber with four dead Hydra soldiers carrying shock batons, a dead scientist, and an overturned tray of half-rotten meat. Two hallways lead off from the room.

“So,” says Falsworth, staring down at the tray of meat, “do we go where the meat came from, or where it was going?”

Bucky squats down next to Falsworth and grabs a gobbet of meat. He sniffs it, then throws it back on the tray. “It’s cow meat. Not people meat,” he says. “We should follow where it was going.”

Falsworth sighs and glances at Morita for sympathy. “I was afraid he’d say that.”

Morita just shrugs, and reloads his gun.

Gabe picks up the one German lantern that hadn’t broken in the fight with the Hydra soldiers, and they turn down the left-hand corridor. _Sinister_ , Steve thinks, remembering Sister Mary Immaculata’s attempts to teach him basic Latin in school. It widens, with what the men first think are cubbyholes on either side. Then they see the rusted chains, and the dry brown splashes on the walls.

Each one is empty.

Except the largest one, at the end. The men can hear animal noises, scratching and snuffling. They can hear the clink of a chain.

Steve motions for Gabe and Dugan to go first. They step through the entrance quickly, Gabe raising the lantern high and Dugan with his gun at the ready.

Briefly, Steve thinks it’s a large dog. That’s before he sees the wings and claws and teeth and horns. The barbed tail lashing at them as it lunges and roars at the Commandos, terrifyingly large jaws snapping at them as the collar around its neck jerks it back. Its scaled skin is the color of old blood, and there is nothing but hatred in its yellow eyes.

“I can’t get a shot,” Dugan says, shifting the rifle around. “It’s moving too fast, and if I miss, the ricochet will come right back at us.”

So Steve steps in, shield raised. He’s about to throw it, to cleave the beast’s wedge-shaped head in two, when it stops its lunging and tilts its head, looking at Steve curiously. Its nostrils flare.

Steve shifts his grip on the shield, hesitating, wondering if he should knock the beast out rather than killing it, when Bucky’s fingers close over his bicep. “I’ll take care of this,” Bucky says. His voice is low, vicious, full of barely concealed fury. “All of you. Leave. Blow this place.”

“But Sarge—“ Dugan starts.

Bucky steps closer to the thing on the chain then, deliberately, turns his back on it. He’s well within range to be mauled, but instead, the beast is prostrating itself on the ground, whimpering, its evil yellow eyes fixed on Bucky and its tail tucked between its legs.

“Don’t worry about me,” Bucky says. “Now go.”

Dugan and Gabe don’t need to be told twice. They hurry out of the room. Steve holsters his shield on his back and casts a last glance at Bucky, who is scratching the ears of the beast, making gentle shushing sounds at it as it closes its eyes in bliss.

* * *

When the echo of the Howlies’ footsteps have died out in the corridor, Bucky leans over and casually rips the iron collar off the little fallen cherubim. He strokes its tattered wings and runs his fingers over the many new scars on its body before hefting it up into his arms. Its front arms wind around his shoulders and it pushes its snout into his neck.

 _Where’s your sibling_ , he says to it in their own tongue.

The little demon shudders and pushes its face further into the warmth and smell of Bucky. A confused set of images and sensations floods into Bucky’s head, but it’s enough, enough for him to expand his consciousness and pinpoint the thin, dull life force held in another part of the catacombs. Bucky growls, not at the demon, but at those who would dare harm it, who would split it from its pair.

He pushes down damp stone corridors, deeper into the labyrinthine prison under the castle, and they find the sibling, in an octagonal room inscribed with ancient sigils, strapped to a silver table, cut open and barely alive. Big chunks are cut out of its flesh, which is a silver-grey to its pair’s dark crimson.

Bucky eases the first demon down onto the floor and frees its sibling. His hands brush over them, comforting, healing.

 _I’m taking you home_ , he says, picking up both of them. They cling to him. _Tell the others not to obey any summons, no matter how innocuous they seem. There is no safety for us up here_.

He shuts his eyes and steps Between.

* * *

The Howlies make it most of the way to the castle’s courtyard, charges set, before bad luck sees a Hydra soldier get to an alarm lever before Steve’s shield does. The plan, of course, was to get out of the castle the way they came in. But no plan survives a contact. Hydra soldiers pour out of upper rooms, blocking the corridors behind them.

“We’ll go out the main gate!” Steve says, urging his men out into the open where they’ll have more room to fight. His tactical mind races: the Hydra soldiers will be in a bottleneck, coming out of the castle entrance. If the Howlies can get out in enough time to find some cover to fire behind, the current 60 to 6 odds don’t actually look so bad.

He welcomes the battle. It helps keep his mind off Bucky.

The courtyard is large and irregularly shaped around the main tower the Howlies emerged from. There’s a separate corner tower in the back, a main gate in the front, a line of what appear to be stables or carriage-houses along the East wall. Wrapped around everything are the high, crenellated stone walls that give the castle its impenetrable status on the mountain. Those walls are lined with lights that blast down into the courtyard, illuminating it as bright as day.

Hydra soldiers pour out of that main tower. They are well armed and armoured, but coming out two or three abreast leaves them painfully open to the Howlies’ fire. Steve is just about to give the order to cover him while he rushes the gate, when a man steps onto a balcony three stories up the main tower.

Steve recognises the man from Peggy’s intelligence files: Baron von Strucker, an occult-obsessed Hydra colonel who worked with an Austrian doctor named Zola on unspeakable human and animal experiments. What Steve doesn’t recognise is the strange, old-fashioned helmet the man wears, a green stone in it glowing.

He can’t look away from the stone. It consumes his attention, sapping his will to fight.

“Ah, Captain Rogers, we were hoping you would join us,” Strucker purrs. “Dr Zola is so eager to have a look at you.”

And if Steve could look away from the stone, could tear his eyes from that fascinating glow, he’d see the round-faced man with glasses peering out a window, assessing him like a butcher assesses a lamb for slaughter.

“Come, Commandos. You needn’t fight. Come, let’s talk,” Strucker says, and it seems so reasonable. Steve doesn’t want to kill any more. It’s so nice, this peace and quiet high on the mountain, now that the buzzing song of bullets has stopped. His fingers begin to loosen around the straps of the shield. Dugan is already standing, slipping his rifle off his shoulder, as the Hydra soldiers move to surround them.

Something falls onto the ground with a thud, near the thickest group of soldiers. Steve sees it in the corner of his eye and it confuses him. He’s dimly aware of another thing falling. A stone? A bird landing?

Then there’s the roar of explosions, and the shockwave of the second one knocks Steve off his feet. His head hits the hard-packed dirt of the courtyard, his gaze torn from Strucker’s helmet. And, without its sickly glow clouding his mind’s eye, he remembers why he is here. It’s not to talk.

“They’ve a man on the wall!” Strucker shouts. “Get hi—“

Steve squints, only looking at Strucker out of the corner of his eyes, and flings his shield as hard as he can. It sings across the courtyard, a hard, diagonal throw, and buries its invincible edge into the centre of the glowing green stone on Strucker’s helmet.

Strucker screams as the stone shatters into an ugly, viscous liquid. Around it, the iron helmet begins to glow red before melting, both itself and the fragile bone and flesh beneath it.

As Steve re-engages the Hydra soldiers, he glances upwards when he can, as the Baron’s clothes and skin melt off his body, and eventually his skeleton, too, turns to ash. Soon, all that is left of him is a bilious column of green and black smoke rising into the night sky in the shape of a screaming face.

One of the Hydra officers swears as a bullet from DumDum ricochets off his helmet. Steve has enough German by now to understand when the man turns and shouts to his troops, “Release Zola’s monsters!”.

A trio of Hydra soldiers run towards a corner tower and wrestle with a mechanism to open its heavy steel door. Then there’s the hum of bullets, and they fall, _one, two, three,_ neat headshots from above. _Bucky_ , Steve thinks, and a quick glance onto the castle’s crenellations shows him the lean black snout of a rifle muzzle emerging from the shadows. Bucky gets them all before they open the door more than a crack, but it’s enough.

Desperate hands reach through the narrow gap between the foot-thick steel door and the stone wall, and inhuman strength shoves the door open the rest of the way.

The Hydra soldiers take one look at the creatures emerging from the dark doorway and, to a man, retreat into the castle’s main tower, slamming and barring the doors behind them.

Steve and Monty exchange worried glances. “What fresh hell,” Monty whispers.

What fresh hell indeed. Two dozen men, pasty skin, rage in their eyes, each the size and muscle mass of Steve, come shambling towards them in a faster than human run. Each has a shaved head, showing horrible scarring and a metal plate embedded into their skulls. None is armed, but none need to be.

Because Steve recognises them. Or, more accurately, he recognises what’s been _done_ to them.

They’re the German volunteers for the same serum Steve almost got. But instead of the remorseful, morally conflicted Abraham Erskine, these men had Arnim Zola. Who solved the problem of the twisted minds by lobotomizing the volunteers.

Steve shudders, chilled to his very soul, and turns. “Morita! Find us a way out of here. See if there are vehicles in any of those outbuildings!”

Morita salutes, and dashes off at a crouched run towards the stables that squat at the bottom of the East wall. Dernier follows him, because Dernier can hotwire a car like nobody’s business.

“The rest of you: head shots only, and don’t go hand to hand. These men have the super-serum,” Steve says. “If they get close, they’ll tear you apart.”

And that’s all the warning they have before the mutilated German supersoldiers are on them. Bucky drops three of the closest ones with neat rifle shots before the Hydra soldiers in the tower open up on him from high windows, trying to knock him off his perch. He splits his fire between shooting back at his harassers and at the supersoldiers on the ground, but it’s not enough to turn the onslaught.

They get to Gabe first. They move like a pack, rabid, super-strong, and destroying everything in their path. Steve flings his shield, hoping to catch the pack’s attention, and sucks in a horrified breath when the lead German super-monster puts out his hand, catches the shield, and throws it away. The man-monster turns back towards Gabe, knocking Gabe’s gun out of his hands and grabbing the man by the neck.

“Hey!” Steve yells. He pulls out his pistol and shoots, blowing the back of the leader’s head off. The leader’s corpse falls, its hand relaxing. Gabe falls backwards and scrabbles for his rifle.

“Hey, over here!” Steve yells again, firing blindly into the group, trying to wound them, to anger them further.

It works.

As one, they turn towards him.

As Steve is rushed by twenty German super-monsters, he sees something falling out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t have time to think what it is, locked as he is in a vicious hand to hand fight with men who, for all they lack intelligence, still are possessed with the low cunning of the desperate, combined with the strength of a supersoldier.

Steve feels ribs snap as a fist connects with his side. He lurches slightly, and then there’s an impossibly strong hand around his wrist, tightening. He fires blindly with his pistol, trying to clear space, to stop the hand that is grinding his wrist bones together, and then when the pistol is empty he uses it as a club.

Something bright flashes towards him and crunches into the head of the monster trying to tear off his wrist. It takes Steve a moment to recognise that it’s his shield. He throw his useless pistol into another monster’s face and grabs the shield back. A few blows with it clears him some room to move.

There are fewer monsters. He looks around, and realises the Howlies are picking off the ones they can, anytime there’s a clear shot. When there isn’t a clear shot, they’re trying to keep the Hydra soldiers in the tower away from the windows.

The twisted supersoldiers still come at him, though, a dozen of them throwing themselves against the shield, trying to reach over it, to kick under it. He’s in the centre of a circle of super-powered death, and all he can do is stall, keep their attention, and hope the Howlies can turn the tide from outside. The moment he gets pulled into a fight with one of the German super-soldiers, the rest will bury him.

Then there’s a shout, and something bounces into the circle Steve has cleared. He glances down. It’s a head. A German super-soldier head, the dull plate in it skull and ugly wire stitching around it gleaming dully agains the sallow skin.

The group splits, some of them turning away from Steve, towards the new assailant. Another one drops at the outside from a Howlies bullet, and Steve throws a quick salute to Gabe for a good shot.

And Steve gets a glance at which particular idiot from his squad has thrown himself into direct combat with a bunch of lobotomized super-soldiers. It’s exactly the idiot he expects, coated in other people’s blood, grinning savagely as he wields a long blade in one hand and a short fighting knife in the other. Both weapons drip with blood.

Steve grins back and starts laying to with his shield, breaking skulls and necks where he can, and anything else that gets in the way when he can’t.

He and Bucky end up back to back, fighting as one against these twisted experiments gone wrong, these superhumans with no thought in their heads other than destruction. Steve lifts his shield to block a blow and Bucky is under it, long blade nicking out, cutting a hamstring, opening up a stomach. Bucky dodges a shattering punch and Steve brings the shield down like an axe, nearly cleaving the assailant’s head in two. And on the perimeter, from behind walls and around corners, the Howlies pick off any soldier that dares stagger away from the group.

The numbers dwindle, until Steve breaks the neck of the last man in front of him and turns to see Bucky nearly cut his man in two. Bucky smiles, wipes that damn sword — it really _is_ a sword, it’s too long for a knife — on his trousers, and flips it, reversing the grip and slipping it back into its sheath. Steve pants, covered in sweat and blood and the stench of fear, and fights the electricity he feels in his groin, the almost unbearable urge to haul Bucky in for a kiss. But there’s still a tower full of Hydra soldiers to worry about and—

A car horn honks. Morita hauls out of one of the stables behind the wheel of a Mercedes staff car, Dernier waving from the back seat. “Cinq minutes!” Dernier yells. “Then boom!” Morita wrenches the wheel around, grinds the gears, and doesn’t quite stop the car so much as stall it.

Steve grabs Bucky and hauls him towards the car as the Nazis in the tower start to pepper the courtyard with bullets. The rest of the Howlies break for the car, too, ending up in an uncivilized pile in the back seats. Bucky flings his last grenade at the castle gates, blowing it open, and Monty wrestles Morita out of the driver’s seat and slams down the clutch and the accelerator.

The car lurches forwards like a bee-stung racehorse while Bucky hangs out of the back, returning fire to the Germans, with Steve holding on to his waistband so he won’t tumble out. They haul down the steep castle access road at unsafe speeds, Monty’s knuckles white on the steering wheel as he takes them around hairpin turns with only two wheels touching the road.

“How long?” Steve shouts at Dernier.

“Anytime!” Dernier shouts back.

Anytime works. Steve can see the road leveling out ahead of them. They’re almost to the bottom of the mountain.

It’s not far enough.

The roar and the glow behind them is startling enough, but then half a breath later the shockwave smacks them like the hand of God, flipping the car into the air and all of them out of it like so much chaff. Leaves, twigs, bits of rock and dirt whip past them as everyone lands as best they can. The car smashes into a tree and then tumbles, beyond repair, into a drainage ditch by the side of the road.

Steve’s not sure if it’s seconds or hours later when he opens his eyes. It’s still night, which is a good sign, and they’re not surrounded by Nazis, which is also good. He sits up and looks around. Bucky is sitting up too, blinking, looking dazed and somewhat singed. The rest of the Howlies are stirring. Everyone’s hearing is down for the count, any sound drowned out under a constant buzzing noise left over from the explosion, but they all haul themselves to their feet and start staggering off down the road towards the field where Howard is due to pick them up. Morita’s sprained his wrist and Dugan’s limping badly, but they’re there, and they’re still alive, and for Steve right then, it’s all that matters.

But they have ten miles to hike to the LZ and once the high of survival wears off, Steve’s mind turns to the horrible, twisted, mirror-universe versions of himself they fought.

After a few minutes, Bucky comes up beside him and bumps his shoulder. “Stop thinking about it.”

“I can’t,” Steve whispers.

“They volunteered, Steve.”

“I volunteered!” Steve hisses. “That could have been _me_.” He bites his lip. “Could you have turned them back?”

Bucky blinks at him. It’s still a couple hours to dawn proper, but the sky is beginning to go grey, and Steve’s perfect night vision can see that stormy grey reflected in Bucky’s eyes. “Steve. They volunteered for Nazi science experiments. I am not turning them back into healthier Nazis. I am sending them to Hell, and when I get back there I will fuck them up some more.”

“What if they didn’t know? What if they were just being patriots… or they were coerced?” Steve says.

Bucky sighs, “Even if those soldiers were coerced, I couldn’t have repaired their minds. I told you. We don’t… it’s the first rule.”

“But humans destroyed their minds. You can’t just put right what humans put wrong?”

Bucky shakes his head. “No. It’s the one thing I won’t do.” Then he fixes Steve with a steely glare. “I have my reasons for wanting that entire castle and everyone in it reduced to ash. Yours were not the only horrors, Steve.”

They walk in silence the rest of the way, Bucky a mass of tightly-controlled fury, Steve’s mind still churning over everything they’d seen in the castle, trying to figure out what had upset Bucky so much.

Even Howard’s cheery ebullience as he ushers them onto the plane provokes no further words from them, or from the rest of the Howlies, dog-tired and sagging under the weight of the horrors they’d seen.

* * *

Back at camp, the Commandos (minus their captain and sergeant) huddle in DumDum and Morita’s tent in the early hours after dawn, exhausted and dirty from the mission, waiting for the mess to open for breakfast. They’re in base, so they could have all the light they want, but there’s only a single hurricane lamp lit on Morita’s footlocker. The darkness is fitting, somehow, allowing them a privacy to cope with the events of the night as each of them are able.

“Share ‘em if you got ‘em,” says Gabe.

Morita grumbles and pulls a beat-up pack of Lucky Strike out of a pocket. He shakes the pack at Gabe, who pulls out one cigarette for his mouth and one to tuck behind his ear. The other Commandos all partake, except for DumDum (who pulls half a cigar out of his breast pocket) and Dernier (with a seemingly infinite supply of Gauloises, each and every one of which he swears is the very last one in his possession, _desolée, mais_ …).

“So are we gonna talk about Sarge?” DumDum mutters after re-lighting his cigar.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Morita says.

“I, I looked back,” Gabe says, hesitantly.

All eyes turn towards Gabe, who swallows, and fidgets. “When we left that room.”

Morita _tsks_ his disapproval, and nobody needs the lamplight to know that he’s shaking his head.

“Sarge was carrying that thing like a baby. It would have torn us to shreds as soon as look at us but Sarge walks in and that… that demon just lays down like a lapdog,” Gabe finishes.

“This is a bad conversation,” Morita warns, an edge creeping into his voice. “Nothing good can come of it.”

“I saw him get shot at Azzano,” DumDum says. “Three rounds from a machine gun across the chest. Just brushed it off like it was crumbs. He swore up and down the next day they’d missed him, but I know what I saw.”

“And watching him and Cap fight together against those… the German monsters… there was no difference. Sarge was just as fast as Cap, just as strong,” Gabe whispers.

“You think zere are two?” Dernier says. “The Americans make two super-soldiers and not tell?”

“I can’t imagine them keeping that secret,” Monty giggles. “The Yanks love to rub their successes in people’s faces too much. Although the image of Barnes being asked to put on tights is one I will now cherish always.”

“I think that we all need to shut the fuck up and be glad Sarge is walking with us,” Morita grumbles.

“You know something,” DumDum says.

“Hey, I dunno shit,” Morita smiles. “I’m just a dumb farmer from Fresno.”

* * *

“What set you off?” Steve asks, as soon as they crawl into their tent at base, and Bucky drops the cone of silence around them. “What were your horrors?”

Bucky’s face is still pinched with fury as he sets his weapons down in an orderly row on his footlocker. “Remember the thing on the chain that tried to attack you?”

Steve nods, blushing. He had a pretty good idea why it had stopped, after scenting him. Then a final, overlooked puzzle piece snaps into place: “You knew it.”

“ _Them_ ,” Bucky corrects. "I knew _them_. Two of them. They’re fallen cherubim. There are always two of them.” He drags a hand down his face, and Steve can see the exhaustion in him. “They’re sweet, harmless creatures. Fond of tricks and practical jokes. Hiding socks, knocking things over in the middle of the night. Not the brightest.” He looks at Steve again, and Steve can see the shimmering glow under the surface of his eyes, a promise that when Bucky finds who was responsible for this he would end their lives slowly and painfully. “Do you know what you have to do to them to make them want to attack like that? How much you have to hurt them?”

Steve gathers Bucky into his arms. Bucky’s entire body is taut, resisting. “Was the second one…?”

“Barely,” Bucky mutters into the side of Steve’s neck. “I healed them, sent them home, but…” Bucky shakes his head, nuzzling still further into Steve. “I think Zola was using their blood to try to stabilize the serum.”

Steve shivers. “What if they summon someone like you,” he says.

“They won’t,” Bucky says, his voice weary. He sighs, and rests his chin on Steve’s chest. “All the summoning stuff is bullshit, anyway. You really think we’d let humans control us? With what we can do? Imagine what a disaster that would be.”

“But Erskine—“ Steve begins.

Bucky wriggles, shucking his jacket and shirt. “Steve. I’m an _archdemon_ , not a garden slug. Salt? _Really?_ You think that’s going to stop me?”

Steve grins, despite himself. “Okay, I see your point.”

Bucky gets heavier, on his chest, as his human body weight is augmented by a half-dozen tentacles. They drape over Steve, tips tucking underneath him. “Nearly everything in ancient tomes about demon summoning was either written or dictated by us. The circles won’t contain us. Even the names are wrong: close enough to let us know who they’re looking for, not close enough to control us. We know when a human is trying to summon us, and if we’re bored or curious, we can appear. If they’re a crazy asshole bent on world destruction, we eat them, or tear them limb from limb, depending on personal taste.”

“So all that about asking permission to come out of the circle..?” Steve says, stroking Bucky’s hair. Bucky has turned his head to rest his cheek on Steve’s right pec, so it’s easier for him to talk.

“Nnh. Just a little pointless showmanship,” Bucky says. Then he frowns and plucks at Steve’s dirty, stinking uniform top. “This. Off.”

“You’ll have to move,” Steve says.

Bucky groans, and remains splayed on top of Steve. So Steve pokes the nearest tentacle repeatedly until Bucky glares at him, smacks the back of his hand with the tip of the tentacle, and rolls off. Steve sits up and watches Bucky stumble around, getting his own trousers and boots off.

“M’gonna warn you, it’s gonna be a pile of tentacles night. Or day. Or whatever the fuck it is right now,” Bucky says, sitting heavily back on the edge of the cot. “But yeah. Say bye-bye to human Bucky for a bit.”

“Okay,” says Steve, sliding to his knees on the floor. “Gonna say goodbye right now.”

Steve pushes Bucky’s legs apart and begins to kiss down his abdomen, down the dark line of hair to the base of his cock, which is beginning to fatten. Bucky exhales, and Steve can feel tentacles coming to rest on his shoulders, around his neck. Steve looks up, and Bucky is gazing at him in a sort of stunned amazement, the glow in his eyes dimming with black lust.

Steve palms his own growing erection, then gazes back up at Bucky and slowly, deliberately, puts his hands behind his back and grasps his own wrists.

Bucky groans, and reaches forwards, grabbing Steve’s hair and pulling him roughly into a hard, heated kiss.

As Bucky bites Steve’s lips to get him to open his mouth, Steve feels tentacles tracing down his arms. He shudders, aching for their touch, and when the first appendage wraps around his wrists like warm, living steel, his whole body spasms, hips jerking forwards.

“None of that,” Bucky whispers into his mouth. “Be a good boy.”

Bucky pushes Steve gently away with his hands, then returns them to gripping the edge of the cot. Steve feels hazy now, and can’t decide whether he wants to go forwards with his original plan of sucking Bucky off, or simply find a way to rut against him to deal with the sudden, desperate need he has to release all the tension of the night.

Bucky decides for him. He stops Steve’s hips by placing a tentacle tip against Steve’s asshole, and draping another large tentacle over Steve’s crotch. He gives Steve a lazy smile as he watches Steve work out that if he attempts to rut against the heavy tentacle in front of his crotch, he loses the questing pressure against his ass. If he pushes back too far against the tentacle behind him, he loses the friction he gets against his cock.

Steve whimpers, annoyed and confused. Together, the pressure at front and back just barely gives him what he needs. But if he tries to pick one over the other, it leaves him with too little, causing his frustration and his lust to increase.

Then smaller tentacles tangle themselves in the back of his hair. “I believe you were about to do something earlier?” Bucky whispers, guiding Steve’s head down to his cock, which is as hard and as purple as his tentacles.

Steve opens his mouth and moans as he takes Bucky’s cock in, as it lays heavy and salty on his tongue, pressing against the back of his throat.

“Are you okay?” Bucky says. “Good to continue? Hum for yes. Gentle bite for no.”

Steve hums, nodding at the same time. Because as soon as Bucky pushed into his mouth, he also began gently rubbing Steve’s cock with one tentacle, and pressing the tip of the other inside him. It still isn’t enough, but Steve is so keyed up that a little bit more feels like an overwhelming wave.

He begins bobbing up and down Bucky’s cock, sucking and licking as well as he can, taking Bucky all the way down to the root. He knows he’s doing well, because the tentacles in his hair tighten, and urge him to move faster.

He keeps his hips perfectly still, and is rewarded by that tentacle tip pushing further into his ass, carefully circling but not touching the bundle of nerves that lights him up like summer fireworks.

Steve moans in frustration and redoubles his efforts. Bucky is starting to fuck into his mouth now, his composure fraying around the edges, muttering about how beautiful Steve is, on his knees, how he’d give Steve everything, how perfect he is. Steve thrills at the power this implies, that he can take Bucky apart as well as Bucky taking him apart.

Bucky finally just holds Steve’s head still with his tentacles and fucks into his mouth, hard and fast and sloppy. He’s also pressing against Steve’s cock with that fat tentacle, rutting against him. Then the other tentacle, the one thrusting into Steve’s ass, hits the right spot and Steve moans and chokes as white-hot pleasure shoots through him, as sharp and sudden as a static shock.

Bucky thrusts a couple last, messy times, pulling halfway out of Steve’s mouth and _no_ , that’s not what Steve wants, he wants Bucky to come in his mouth, he wants to choke on it, to _serve_ , and he pushes himself forwards as best he can and sucks Bucky’s cock back down again, right to the back of his throat, as he feels its length start to pulse.

Steve knows what come tastes like. Not as if he’s ever tasted anyone else’s, but he knows what his own tastes like. But what fills his mouth is something different — thick and smoky in taste, sweet and a little rotten and with the underlying bitterness of gunpowder.

He pulls off in shock, and watches in horrified fascination as Bucky’s cock pulses out one last, black jet of come, feels it land across his face.

Bucky releases him, unbinding his wrists. Then Bucky leans forwards and cups Steve’s face in his hands, brushing the come off him with his thumbs. “Baby,” Bucky says, his voice sex-wrecked (and if that isn’t the most glorious sound). “I’m so sorry, I didn’t think to warn you…”

“…you’re not human,” Steve says, taking Bucky’s hands and looking down at the silvery-black come smeared on his thumbs. He wants to suck it off.

“I keep thinking I’ll have time to explain certain things to you, to move slowly so I don’t frighten you, and then…” Bucky moans and leans forwards and kisses him, soft and gentle. “Then I can’t be slow. You do something, and it makes me want you too badly.”

“Did you mean what you said, earlier, about me being beautiful?” Steve asks.

Bucky leans back on the bed and pulls Steve on top of him. “Every word. I’ll tell you again when I wake up, and every day thereafter until you believe it. And then I’ll tell you twice a day.”

Steve giggles, and bites Bucky’s shoulder. “Are all fallen angels as ridiculous as you?”

“No,” Bucky breathes. “You just summoned the weird one.”

“I’m glad,” Steve hums. “You gonna shift? Can I sleep on you?” He says.

Bucky mumbles his assent, already shifting underneath Steve, until Steve is at rest in the many gently-writhing appendages of a tentacle demon, lavender spots glowing like a sea of stars in their dark little canvas room.

* * *

Steve wakes up hard, in the early evening, just as the bugle sounds for Mess Call. Bucky is still a mass of tentacles, but he must be somewhat awake. Steve works this out because as he rolls from his side onto his stomach on top of Bucky, two tentacles move under him and twist together right in a convenient place for his cock to fit.

Steve brushes his lips over the phosphorescence-spotted back of a large tentacle, and is rewarded by a pat on the ass from another. _Go ahead_ , comes Bucky’s voice in his head. _I like this_.

Steve sticks a hand around himself and guides himself into the slot that Bucky has made. Once inside, he starts lazily grinding into Bucky, bracing his hands on either side of him in the mass of tentacles. Bucky responds, winding tentacles up Steve’s forearms, helping support him. Steve brushes his lips over the silky, sweet surface of the nearest tentacle again, and thrusts faster. It feels so good. Tight and slippery and constantly shifting against him, alive and so, so responsive.

“Fuck,” Steve grits out, eyes squeezed shut, blind to anything but the pleasure he’s chasing from fucking into a tentacled archdemon. As the act of sex pulls him fully into wakefulness, he finds himself full of love and terror: love of Bucky, and a terror of losing him, a certain knowledge that Bucky is it for him. How could anyone else compare?

Steve’s thrusts are wild and hard now, his orgasm taking over him like a tidal wave, and as he comes he feels tears spring into his eyes, and after he groans out Bucky’s name he can’t help reciting over and over like a litany _, I love you, I love you so much_ , and then Bucky has shifted back into human under him and is holding him in his thick arms, whispering, “I love you too, I have always loved you.”

* * *

Steve makes it to dinner with five minutes to spare. He has barely finished loading up a tray when Philips’ adjutant runs over to him, asking him to come have dinner in the SSR colonel’s tent.

Steve awkwardly crosses the camp with his tray and ducks into Philips’ tent. At this point his stomach is growling so loud it sounds like a caged lion, but Steve takes one look at Philips’ gruff demeanour and Peggy’s uncomfortable expression and all thought of eating vanishes.

“What is it?” Steve says, placing the tray on the chair next to him. “Sorry we haven’t done the debrief on the Strucker op yet. We’ve been recovering.”

“This isn’t about the Strucker op,” Philips grumbles.

He pushes a file at Steve. “Your boy’s paperwork finally caught up with us. You know, your childhood best friend who moved to Indiana?” Philips’ tone is flat and his face remains impassive as he flips open the folder.

It’s a Marines personnel file: JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES, SGT. The photo in it is of a short, broad-faced kid, all freckles and big teeth and curly hair. The only thing the kid in the picture has in common with Bucky is that they’re both white.

The file is stamped KIA with a date and the location, GUADALCANAL.

“So,” Philips says, indicating the file. “ _This_ is James Buchanan Barnes. What I want to know, Captain Rogers,” Philips continues, tossing a PR photo of the Howling Commandos on top of the file and jabbing his index finger down on Bucky, “Is who the hell is _that_?”

Steve takes a deep breath. “With respect, sir, you’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking, _what_ is that, and the answer is I can’t tell you, or I could but you probably wouldn’t believe me, but if you remove Bucky from the Howling Commandos you are willfully throwing away a singular asset that far outstrips anything Hydra has.”

Philips makes a beseeching gesture heavenwards. “We like facts, in this here army of ours, Rogers. Who is your sergeant?”

Steve is about to answer when Howard sticks his head in the tent. “Good time, everyone?”

“No,” Peggy barks.

Steve sighs. “It’s fine, Howard. Come in. I could use your confirmation on something.”

“Anything, dear boy. Fire away,” Howard says, fishing a roll off Steve’s abandoned food tray, sniffing it, thinking better of it, and dropping it back on the tray.

“The serum was a hoax, wasn’t it? Erskine never fixed it, right?”

Howard’s mouth gapes. “Ah… uh… clearly he did, though, at the last moment,” he says, gesturing at Steve appreciatively.

“Well, he lied,” Steve says. “What actually happened is he summoned a demon who transformed me into what you see here while the vita-ray machine injected me with saline, and said demon is currently acting as my sergeant.”

Philips blinks at him. Then the colonel slowly sits back in his chair. “That is the biggest load of horsefeathers I’ve ever heard.” He looks over at Howard, and takes in the way Howard is fidgeting nervously. A bushy eyebrow is raised.

“…it _was_ saline, in the machine,” Howard says quietly. “I realised, when I was cleaning it out. I couldn’t figure out what happened, because it would have been just like Abraham to sabotage the experiment to save the kid, here, but … the experiment worked.”

Peggy clears her throat and snatches the file and photos off Philips’ desk. “I’ll be right back,” she says.

Peggy returns a couple of minutes later, Bucky’s PR photo in the place of the boy’s in the personnel file, and REASSIGNED TO SSR instead of KIA on his file. “There. Problem solved,” she says, thrusting the file at Philips.

“Is your Sgt. Barnes… safe?” Philips asks.

“He’s saved my life and the lives of the Commandos multiple times,” Steve says, an edge of anger in his voice. “Besides, it’s a war. None of us are safe.”

“I can vouch for Sgt. Barnes,” Peggy interjects. “While he obviously has no allegiance to any particular nation in this war, he does have a very great allegiance to Captain Rogers and I believe as long as they are not separated, they function far better as a unit than Steve would alone.”

Philips picks up the file, fixes Peggy with a gimlet stare. “I suppose we do have other priorities.”

Steve stands, ready to leave, when he sees Howard looking at him eagerly. The man’s brown eyes are practically bugging out of his head with curiosity. Steve sighs. “You have questions.”

Howard nods enthusiastically.

“I’ll ask him to stop by your lab.”

“Thank you,” Howard mouths.

* * *

Back in their tent, Steve flops onto his cot.

“Mess food that bad?” Bucky smiles.

“No, got hauled in by Philips,” Steve replies. Then he rolls over onto his side to look at Bucky. Beautiful, perfect Bucky, with his aristocratic cheekbones; his tall, muscular body; and his cape of tentacles where his wings used to be. “Bucky, whose face is that?” he asks.

“Hm?” Bucky says, raising his eyebrows. “You know. Prettiest dead kid in all Guadalcanal.”

Steve shakes his head. “So you _do_ lie,” he says.

Bucky stiffens.

“I saw the file,” Steve explains. “Of the real James Buchanan Barnes.” Steve reaches out across the space between the cots and strokes Bucky’s cheek with his thumb. “Whose face is this?”

Bucky melts into Steve’s touch, eyes fluttering closed. Tentacles curl around him, pulling him closer. Steve thinks Bucky won’t reply, but then he starts talking, quiet and confessional. “You were so fierce, and beautiful, this golden shining soul in this delicate body… I wanted to impress you. So… I’m not supposed to, but this is _my_ face, almost. From before. My body, too. But toned down a bit. We’re somewhat ridiculous, as a species.”

A feeling of love and wonder bursts through Steve, and before he can think, he presses his mouth to Bucky’s and then says, “Show me what you looked like before. Please.”

Bucky shakes his head and pulls away. “I can’t. It’s not allowed. I’ll be punished.”

Steve snorts. “How much _more_ trouble can you get in?”

Bucky shrugs, and then a burst of laughter breaks out of him. “I suppose I’ve already fallen once,” he says, lips curled in a smirk. “Come,” he says. “We have to go into the woods. My wings won’t fit in this tent.”

He grabs Steve’s hand and the two of them cut through the evening darkness into the woods around the camp, leaping and running down the wind, beyond human, breathlessly happy, until about five miles out they find a clearing.

Then Bucky presses a kiss to Steve’s forehead and steps back.

Steve watches him as Bucky closes his eyes and tilts his head back, _remembering_.

And then, in the space between blinks, he shimmers, and changes.

All breath escapes Steve.

Bucky in human form was broad-shouldered but lithe below that, with a defined, lean physique. Bucky the angel is a few inches taller, and the potential inherent in those shoulders is fully realised: chest packed with muscle, cutting down in a hard V to a stomach so perfectly defined that it deserves to be carved in marble, and thick powerful legs. His skin glows faintly golden, and his hair is long, flowing to his shoulders. He wears nothing except a loincloth, gathered with a golden belt from which hangs a short sword. Or, Steve thinks, a long knife.

Bucky floats gently in the air a short distance off the ground, feathered wings of lavender and gold and rose outstretched.

Steve has never seen anything so beautiful, or so terrifying, in its absolute power and confidence.

Bucky alights softly, gracefully, in front of Steve. They’re the same height now, and Bucky’s softly glowing eyes meet his. Bucky smiles, almost bashful.

Steve reaches out to touch. Instead of the heat he was expecting, Bucky’s angelic body is cool, like touching marble, and Steve’s fingers trace over the perfect magnificence of him, one hand moving across his stomach, the other carefully touching the miraculous softness of a wing. Bucky moves closer to him. He encircles Steve within his wings, and then cold, soft lips press gently into Steve’s.

Steve smiles.

“What,” Bucky says.

“They’re still sweet.” Steve says, darting in for another taste. “Your lips.”

“Steve, I can’t—“ Bucky begins, then stumbles backwards, doubling over in pain. He doesn’t cry out: Steve notices that; Bucky _never_ cries out when he’s hurt.

And then it’s slim, human Bucky standing before him, tentacles limp and sad, face weary. Smiling through tears. “It’s not hard to hold a three-dimensional form, you know,” Bucky explains, sitting down on the ground and hugging his knees. “Any other body, other face, I could hold it as long as I want. But holding mine… the universe tries to push me away from it.” He smiles, and it’s the saddest smile Steve has ever seen. “I don’t have the right to it any more.”

Steve sits down next to Bucky and wraps himself around him, pulling Bucky into him. Bucky‘s body is warm again, and it’s wonderful. “You were a beautiful angel,” Steve whispers. “But I like you better warm. And I love you any way you can be with me.”

Bucky hugs him back, and Steve feels the short, sharp cold of Between Dimensions. When he opens his eyes again, they’re back in their tent.

“Thank you,” Steve says. “For showing me.”

They curl up together on the bed. Bucky is clearly exhausted, the effort of seizing his old form back even briefly from the universe taking every ounce of energy he had. He curls up in Steve’s arms, tucking his head into Steve’s chest.

Steve brushes gentle kisses on the top of his head, and on the couple of tentacles he can reach without displacing Bucky. He lets his hands explore, running along Bucky’s sides and then around to his back, where the tentacles spring from. Bucky’s wings had been huge affairs, their bases anchored all the way down his back from his scapula down to bottom of rib cage in a pronounced V formation. Bucky’s tentacles follow the same lines, Steve realises, emerging from a fat mass of scar tissue. The larger tentacles are nearer to his scapula and then they tend to get smaller as they go down. He rubs Bucky there, on the scarring, around the root of one of the smaller tentacles low on his back.

Bucky moans and convulses against him, and Steve feels a wet kiss being pressed to his collarbone. “Keep doing that,” Bucky rumbles.

Steve smiles and rolls Bucky so the demon is lying on top of him, and Steve can use both his hands on Bucky’s back. He starts low, rubbing the scar tissue and circling his fingers around the base of each tentacle, gently tugging on their roots as if lazily masturbating them.

Bucky groans again, and grinds himself against Steve. The hot hardness of his erection pushes against the crease of Steve’s hip.

Steve moves his hands up to the next larger pair of tentacles and begins massaging and stroking them, and the scarring around them. “This is good?”

“Fuck,” moans Bucky. “Nobody’s ever touched me… there, before. I didn’t know— _uuuunf_ ,” he says, his hips pushing into Steve.

“Were your wings…?”

Bucky barks out a laugh, that tails off into a needy little whine when Steve’s hands circle a larger tentacle. “No, and I have had the base of my wings grabbed during sex. It was never like, _fuck_ , Steve, I’m going to come if you keep doing this.”

“All the more reason for me to do it. Let me make _you_ feel good for once.”

Bucky’s eyes darken, and he pushes himself up, away from Steve. “Wait. Stop. I don’t think you’re getting this,” Bucky says. “You need to stop judging others by your own standards of selflessness.” He reaches down and puts his hand around his cock, stroking himself. “I do this because it feels good for _me_ , always. Getting you bound and eagerly taking whatever I give you, making you stop goddamn _thinking_ for a while, Steve, that makes me feel better than you can ever understand.”

“Oh,” Steve says. Then a slow, wicked smile spreads across his face. “But I still kinda want to see if you can come just from me rubbing your back.”

Bucky narrows his eyes and growls low in his throat, but lies down grudgingly next to Steve, settling his head on the back of his hands, and spreading out his shoulders.

Steve presses kisses down the centre of Bucky’s back, feeling the strength in it needed to support the weight of the tentacles, the extra saddle of bone on the back of his ribs to anchor them in place. Then he places his hands on Bucky’s back. This time, he decides to start at the top, with the largest tentacles. They’re almost too large to fit his hands around, at their bases, so he presses kisses there too, sucking on the soft join between where pale skin deepens into the dove-grey of the tentacle. That tentacle jerks, spasming, as Bucky’s hips also thrust into the mattress.

“Keep… doing… that,” Bucky gasps between thrusts.

Steve sucks on the bases of the largest tentacles while his hands move down to the next pair, rubbing and manipulating the slightly wrinkled skin at their bases like he would his own cock. Bucky’s face, turned towards him, is transformed, more beautiful than ever in ecstasy, as his body twitches uncontrollably. Steve gets whacked by a few flailing tentacles, but he doesn’t mind. Watching Bucky come apart under his tongue and his hands is more than worth a few bruises.

He gets an idea, and moves his mouth from the big tentacles to halfway down Bucky’s back, to a tentacle small enough he can just about wrap his entire mouth around it. He sucks, hard, and makes little thrusts against it with his tongue at the same time he grips hard onto the two tentacles in his hands.

Bucky keens, his hips jerking against the bed, and then the scent of brimstone fills the air. He stops moving, his body still shuddering through aftershocks, and then he flops inelegantly on his side, pulling gently away from Steve.

Bucky is panting, radiant, absolutely wrecked. He’s staring at Steve with this look of wonder and disbelief. Then, clumsily, he reaches his hand around the back of Steve’s neck and hauls him in for a messy, lazy kiss. “Mkay,” he mumbles, “that was completely worth the pain of getting thrown out of my true form again.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Steve says.

“Mm-hmm.”

“You don’t have to answer.”

“Mm, you’re going to ask me how I fell, aren’t you,” Bucky says. But the edge of his mouth is tugging into a smile, so Steve figures he’s not mad.

“Yeah.”

Bucky pulls Steve closer, wrapping him in arms and tentacles and tucking Steve’s head on top of his shoulder, into the crook of his neck. “I told you I was curious, right?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“When I was in human form, I had sex with a few humans. I was careful, of course. In every case, they approached me. I didn’t… _start_ anything. I figured I could rationalize it as making them happy.” Bucky presses a kiss into Steve’s hair, and sighs. “But then He gave me a mission, and… it wasn’t about helping, or making someone happy. It was being His vessel to have sex with a woman. She didn’t know it would happen. I was to grab her and force myself on her and then remove her memories of it.”

“I thought you said messing with people’s heads wasn’t allowed,” Steve replies.

“It wasn’t,” Bucky says, fidgeting. “I said no. We’re not allowed to say no. Goodbye, state of grace. Perhaps I had indeed been around humans too long, and your ways changed me. That’s what the others said. That I was debased. Lesser.” Bucky sighs, his voice sad. “I had liked being unusual. I’d been proud of it. But it turns out I wasn’t unusual at all, I was just following a pre-arranged plan the whole time.”

“Until the moment you didn’t,” Steve says.

Bucky hums. “Sometimes I wonder if that wasn’t part of the plan, too.”

“I’m okay with the plan, because you ended up here with me,” Steve says. That gets a smile out of Bucky.

Steve figures he might as well bring out the other thing that had been preying on his mind since the Strucker op. “Buck, you said something on the way back from the castle. That you were going back to Hell. Is that… after the war?”

“No, baby,” Bucky says, squeezing Steve a little tighter. “Only if you die. I couldn’t stand to remain here, with you gone.”

“Oh,” Steve says, picturing Bucky, forever young and beautiful, next to him as he grows grey and bent. “You won’t get old, will you? But I will.”

Bucky giggles. “No, you won’t. I might have made you somewhat functionally immortal.”

“What?!” Steve squawks.

Bucky snorts, amused. “Never make a vague request of a demon. We’ll interpret it as we see fit.”

Steve pretends to be annoyed, but he knows Bucky can feel the smile he’s pressed into Bucky’s side.

* * *

Two weeks later, they get a lead on Zola, the scientist who created the lobotomized super-soldiers. Dr Frankenstein had apparently escaped the castle through the tunnel that the Commandos had used to get in, moments before the place collapsed.

The intel says Zola is traveling from Germany to Austria, fleeing deeper into Nazi territory. The train he’s on dips down across the top of the Italian Alps.

Philips points to the area on the map, and says, “You’ll hit him there. If he gets where he’s going, he’ll be too deep in enemy territory for us to touch him.”

(Bucky’s eyes narrow, and only Steve hears him whisper, “Speak for yourself.”)

* * *

Zola’s escort is not that of a fleeing man. It’s that of a spider, spinning a web, using himself as bait. There are a dozen of Hydra’s elite stormtroopers, heavily armored and carrying the deadly blue guns Steve thought they’d destroyed at Azzano.

It goes well until the moment it doesn’t: fighting in a cramped freight car barely 200 yards away from Zola’s personal carriage, Steve’s shield doesn’t come back to him. It lodges in a crate, too far away for him to grab.

And the Nazi with the blue gun fires at him.

Steve falls to the side, hit by something, and rolls to grab his shield. He’s rising to his feet, already aiming his shield, compensating for the roar of the train and a blast of freezing Alpine wind, before he realises the thing that hit him wasn’t the devastating bolt of energy from the gun.

It was Bucky.

There’s a hole in the train car. The wind— it’s from a hole in the car.

He can’t see Bucky, but when he shuts his eyes he can see the blue flash, and Bucky’s left arm disintegrating, as if it never existed.

A tide of fury and terror rises within Steve, dwarfing anything else he’s felt in his small, angry life. He flings his shield so hard at the Hydra stormtrooper it severs his head and then embeds in the steel door behind him.

He rushes to the ragged hole in the car and is just in time to see Bucky fall, for the second time in the former archangel’s long, strange existence.

* * *

Steve refuses to leave their camp. Peggy and Howard arrive to pick them up and take Zola back to the SSR, but Steve won’t leave the little clearing with the pup tents at the base of the Italian side of the mountain, where they’d begun this cursed mission.

Peggy tries to talk sense into him, but even her sangfroid slips in the face of the hiccuping, sobbing mess that is Steve. He refuses to listen to her, repeating over and over, “He’ll come back I know he’ll come back we just have to wait—“

Peggy strokes his hair, gives him her clean handkerchief, and stalks back to the plane in search of reinforcements.

Howard glances at his watch and frowns at her. The Howling Commandos are sitting around smoking. None of them will meet her eyes.

Except Morita.

He stubs out a Lucky Strike and ambles over to her, hands in pockets. Says nothing more than, “He’s in a bad way, isn’t he?”

Peggy nods. She puts a hand over her lips, hiding her expression, but Morita can see how the corners of her eyes pinch with emotion. “For the first time in my life, I don’t know what to say,” she says, her voice high and uneven.

Morita bobs his head, thinking something over. Then, casually, as if he were wandering over to check on his laundry, he directs his steps towards the campsite. “No promises,” is all he says.

* * *

Steve is aware of a presence sitting down next to him, and there’s the sound of a match being lit. Then the smell of a slightly stale Lucky Strike fills the air.

“You know, my grandpa was a famous artist in Japan,” Morita says. “That’s how we had enough money to come to America. He painted illustrations of yokai, a whole book of them, and it became really popular.”

“What’s a yokai?” Steve says. His eyes are piercingly blue against the red around them.

Morita has to look away and take a long drag on his cigarette before answering. “They’re spirit-demons. Often they’re tied to a particular place, though some are more tied to specific animals, or situations. They can be really dangerous if you piss them off, but mostly they’re just mischievous. Japan is full of them. Only certain people can see them, though, and my grandpops was one of them. And it turns out that yokai love publicity as much as the next mook, so sooner or later they start showing up at our house.”

“In Japan?”

“Yeah, but they also came to Fresno, too.”

“What were Japanese demons doing in Fresno?”

“Beats the hell outta me, Cap. I think Japanese people just spontaneously generate yokai wherever we go. Anyhow, grandpops used to paint them just based on his imagination, and the stories people told him. But then the yokai started showing up, saying _Morita-san, please, give me a bigger mouth next time, make my teeth more fearsome. Morita-san, you made a mistake, I’m red, not yellow_. And grandpops would do two new drawings, one to give the yokai, and one to put in a revised edition of the book. Because a man who has a yokai on his side is a man who will never walk in fear.”

Morita leans over and bumps Steve’s shoulder. “And that’s why I’ve always been happy that Barnes served alongside us.”

Steve’s head whips around and he stares at Morita.

Morita takes another drag on his cigarette and narrows his eyes. “Though Barnes was more of an oni. They’re bigger, and way more badass.”

Steve giggles a little bit. “You knew,” he says.

“Yeah. I did. I mean, spirits are our family business.” Morita snorts. “Well, that and oranges. The others suspected something was up with Barnes, but the best guess was he’d had the serum too.”

“Can they die?” Steve asks, his voice choked. “Yokai. Oni.”

“Yeah,” Morita says. “But it takes a lot to do it.”

“Do you think he’s dead?” Steve says. “He couldn’t shift when he fell, couldn’t go between dimensions… it was like the blast stuck him in his human form… it, it blew off his arm…”

Morita looks at Steve, his warm brown eyes sympathetic. “I think nothing in this world could keep him from coming back to you, if he were able. Come back to base. Maybe he’ll be waiting there, smoking all our cigarettes and warming the nurses up for DumDum’s awful pickup lines.”

Steve let himself be led onto the plane. He sat in the back, in the shadows, and thought about praying. But he couldn’t figure out who to pray to.

* * *

  
Bucky didn’t come back.

The war kept going. Bucky wasn’t even the most famous dead boy that day: a heartthrob musician had got himself blown up in the Hurtgen Forest.

The missions kept coming, as they got closer and closer to destroying the centre of the Hydra. Not its heads, but its ugly, red heart.

* * *

Peggy’s no fool. She knows why Steve went down with the plane.

She knows who he was trying to rejoin.

* * *

Bucky tries to shift as he falls, tries to go Between. He tries to re-form the arm that had been blown off, but it’s like the blast had locked him, somehow. In his surprise and terror, he can’t access any of his powers. He can only fall, and stare in horror at the place his left arm used to be.

When he wakes up he is being dragged into a Hydra lab. He still can’t regrow the arm. Everything is wrong. They tell him Steve is dead, that nobody is coming for him.

He knows this is punishment for daring to assume his angelic form again. He knows there is no escape.

So he uses the tiny flicker of his power — returning, but too slowly — to lock it all away: his memories, his love of Steve, his abilities, any form beyond the ragged, starved human one he inhabits. He remembers what Hydra did to the poor fallen cherubim. It will be so much worse, he thinks, if they realise they have an archdemon. The war must end soon. He can endure until then.

* * *

Zola returns a month later and is told of the American, who doesn’t know his own name, who does nothing but stare vacantly at the wall of his cell.

The little scientist rubs his hands together with glee. “Finally,” he says. “Here we have a serum which perfects bodies but twists minds, and there we have a soldier with no mind.”

He smiles, his teeth small and crooked. “Inject him. Maximum dosage. We shall have our weapon.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bleh, I was supposed to finish this a week ago. Bleh, it’s 11000 words, how did that happen.
> 
> If you’re interested in learning more about yokai and yurei (Japanese ghosts), a really wonderful place to begin is in Shigeru Mizuki’s classic manga series KITARO. You could also pick up any of Zack Davisson’s books on the subject (Zack is Mizuki’s English-language translator). Mizuki’s ONWARDS TOWARDS OUR NOBLE DEATHS is a really amazing manga about his service in the Japanese army during WWII, for all you pacific front nerds.


	6. Chapter 6

The black man doesn’t take off his coat when he sits down. He never does.

He never smiles, either, but Steve knows how that feels.

Steve sits down in the old Windsor chair across the cabin’s farmhouse table from Director Fury, squinting into the morning light pouring into the kitchen windows. He wished Fury had wanted coffee. A coffee mug would have given him something to do with his hands. As it is, if he manages to stop wringing them, it’s only to start tapping them on the table’s waxed wooden surface.

“My people tell me you aren’t sleeping very well,” Fury says. “There anything we can do?”

Steve shakes his head, staring down at the table’s worn surface. “No. I just…” He sighs. “I miss…”

Fury raises the eyebrow of the visible eye.

Steve throws his weight against the back of the chair. It creaks in protest. “I miss my unit. They were… extraordinary people. I was very close to them.”

“Well,” Fury says, examining his fingernails, “we’re putting together another unit of… extraordinary individuals.” Then Fury looks up, and Steve looks back at him, pinned by the intensity of that one brown eye. “People with powers. People who are like you. Not just great soldiers.”

Steve swallows and tears his gaze away. “No, thank you,” he says. Those three words have to stand in for all the other things he wants to say but can’t, such as _How dare you,_ and _Bucky was the most extraordinary of them all and nothing will ever replace him_ , and _I’m tired_. “I’m sorry,” he manages, after the silence starts to curdle into awkwardness.

“Okay,” Fury says, in a tone that means it’s not okay, and he’s just going to ask again next time. Then he gestures around him. “Cabin all right? Don’t want to go back to New York City? Or come down to Washington?”

Steve shakes his head, staring at the table again. “No. I’m fine here, thanks. It’s still all… very new. I lost everyone four weeks ago. I… I can’t...” He puts his elbows on the table and buries his face in his hands. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll reiterate that I think it’s wise you see a therapist, or a grief counselor. SHIELD has a number of—“

“No,” Steve says. “I want to be alone with it. Please.”

“Okay,” Fury says, his chair scraping against the floorboards as he gets up. “If you change your mind, let me know.”

Steve nods, and doesn’t look up as he hears Fury’s footsteps fade; hears the screen door slam behind him.

He waits a couple miserable, furious hours, for the sun to be high in the sky. For Fury to be really gone. Then he slips on his running shoes and heads out onto the network of dirt trails he’s gradually worn through the vast forests around him.

After about twelve miles, Steve comes to the waterfall. He doesn’t even bother stripping off his clothes. Just toes off his shoes and socks at the bank of the pool and wades in until he’s standing under the freezing cascade.

And finally Steve can say what he really wants to say. What he had been saying to Fury, if the man could have understood. The name comes out in a hoarse, choking cry: _Bucky_.

Fury had wanted him to fight again, in previous meeting even insinuating that Steve owed them, owed the United States government for the body and abilities it had given him. And Steve had wanted to scream the truth at him: the serum was a sham. He was nothing more than expendable bait, in a government plan to catch German spies.

But instead he pressed his lips together and told Fury he’d think about it.

The only one who had ever given him anything was Bucky. Bucky, who history barely remembered, but Steve did. With every breath, Steve remembered him. Bucky who gave him everything, and asked for nothing in return beyond the chance to help again.

Icy, mountain-fresh water does its best to chill the burning rage and sorrow in Steve’s soul, even as Steve adds his own tears to the torrent.

He had held a miracle in his arms, once.

* * *

Fury checks in with the surveillance team at the nearby SHIELD base on his way out. When he asks how Captain Rogers is doing, the chubby, Korean-American male agent breaks into a huge grin and is only stopped from saying something by the mousy White female agent punching him in the shoulder.

The female agent narrows her eyes and addresses Fury as the guy rubs his arm and scowls. “I think he’s declining, sir. Restless. Sleeps maybe an hour or two a night. Exercises himself into oblivion.”

“He eating?” Fury asks.

“Yeah, the meals we drop off get finished. But it’s…”

The female agent runs a hand through her hair. Fury tries to remember her name. Pammy?

“…it’s mechanical, like it’s something he has to do, rather than he wants to do.” Patty. That’s it.

The male agent wrinkles his nose like he’s suppressing a sneeze, and then blurts out, “He’s discovered porn, sir.” Then he dissolves into snorting giggles, his shiny cheeks pinking.

“Fucksake, Ed,” Patty breathes, facepalming.

“Oh?” Fury says.

“Yeah,” Ed says, swiveling back and forth in his chair a little as he talks. “Cap’s into some _extremely_ kinky shit. But it’s weird, he finds a video, watches like five seconds of it, then makes a face and turns it off.”

Patty sighs. “He’s probably ashamed. The poor guy is from like a hundred years ago.”

Ed waves his hands. “It’s… It’s not an ashamed face. More like… he’s annoyed. Or disappointed.”

“And what sort of kinky shit is the good Captain watching?” Fury asks.

“Gay bondage porn,” says Patty.

“Nothing else?” Fury asks.

“Nope,” says Ed, popping the final p with obvious relish.

Fury rubs the bridge of his nose. He’s not a man who is surprised easily, but there was nothing in Former Director Carter or General Philips’ very thorough and personal reports that suggested Cap swung that way. And Fury is many things, but an idiot isn’t one of them. He can work out who Cap would have been doing his _extremely kinky shit_ with. He remembers the wartime publicity photos of the Howling Commandos, the dark-haired sergeant who was always at Rogers’ side. And, briefly, he feels bad for Cap.

“Keep an eye on him,” Fury says, narrowing his own eye at Ed. “And more than his internet search history.” Then he smiles, sharklike. “By the way, I ever tell you what happened to the last person who broke SHIELD’s confidentiality agreement?”

Ed shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

“Sir, one last thing,” Patty says, squaring her shoulders and sitting up straighter. “I got my BA in psych before I joined SHIELD. I wanted to say that I’m not sure isolating a severely depressed person like this is a good idea, no matter what his circumstances are.”

Fury stills. “Our top SHIELD psychiatrist created Captain Rogers’ acclimatization plan,” he responds.

“Why hasn’t he come to check on Captain Rogers’ progress, then?” Patty says. “Only you come.”

“Hmph,” Fury says. “I’ll look into it.” He looks over their shoulders at the hidden-camera footage. Rogers is sitting listlessly in an armchair, staring off into space. “You’re right about one thing. He’s not getting better.”

* * *

“Mission report, Soldier.”

The metal-armed machine places its boots within the red rectangle painted on the base floor and looks at its handler. Beyond, it can see the Chair, but its eyes slide away from it. Bored techs sit around, waiting for him. One of them, a red-haired man with glasses, flips through a magazine as he leans against the maintenance table next to the Chair.

“Soldier!”

The thing, this Soldier, looks to its handler again. How much time had it lost? Not more than a minute. There’s punishment if it fails to respond within a minute. It blinks. “Kill shot at 1.5 miles. No survivors. No witnesses. No collateral damage.”

The handler nods. “Weapons,” he says.

The Soldier lifts its arms away from his sides. Two Hydra commando force members step cautiously forwards and, when it doesn’t react, begin stripping it of its field weapons. The rifle first. Then the small arms, and knives, and grenades. It doesn’t look at them. Nor does it look at the other ten commandos, guns held at the ready, in case it malfunctions again.

Instead, its attention is caught by the bright flutter of magazine pages. The red-haired tech is showing the magazine around, the other techs expressing amazement or disgust at the contents. This is new. Something has happened. It stares, trying to parse what is causing so much excitement among the techs. Its tactical goggles conceal its gaze enough from its handler that, for the moment, it is safe to indulge its curiosity.

One of the commando force members looks over at the Handler. “Strip it or wipe it first?”

The Hander makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Wipe it.”

The commando grins. “Hey, you think the chiefs are gonna order us to wind it up and send it after Captain Popsicle? ‘Cause I’d _pay_ to see that fight.”

The Handler’s lip curls slightly. “Not our place to guess the chiefs’ plans.” Then he snaps his fingers. “Soldier, go sit in the chair.”

The Soldier’s face makes no sign of acknowledgement, but its feet move it forwards until it’s in front of the Chair.

The red-haired tech closes the magazine and tosses it, face down, on the maintenance table.

It’s a bad throw.

The magazine slips off, falling onto the floor, face up.

The Soldier looks down.

There, framed in a red border with the word TIME across the top, is the photo of a blond man in a red, white and blue uniform. There is something odd about the photo, as if once it wasn’t in color. Below, in letters almost as big as the magazine name, it just says, “ALIVE”.

The Soldier’s body is moving before its brain catches up. It scoops up the fallen magazine in its weak hand and looks again at the photo.

“Uh, guys,” the red-haired tech says as he backs away, “we have a problem?”

“What, you worried it’s going to kill you with a newsmagazine,” one of the commandos cackles.

The Soldier hears this, dimly, as it looks for more pictures of the blond man. There’s one, obviously a cellphone shot, of the man in Times Square, looking overwhelmed.  
  
The picture causes a strange ache in the Soldier’s head.

“It’s never done that before,” the red-haired tech says. He makes a hesitant hand motion, as if he wants to take his magazine back, then reconsiders.

“Look, it’s basically a big dog. Speak nicely to it, give it a treat, and it’ll drop its toy,” another of the commandos calls out.

“Soldier, sit in the chair,” the Handler says.

It stares at the photos of wide blue eyes and messy cornsilk hair, and it becomes aware that Hydra’s programming is not its first.

There is an earlier imperative. A more important one.

It knows that there is a part of it which is shut behind a heavy steel door in its mind. Hydra has never shown interest in that part, and it learned long ago not to volunteer information. But the man on the magazine cover—

His gaudy uniform—

_This. Off. Now._

The Soldier reaches within itself and opens that door.

The Handler strides forwards, unsheathing the stun baton at his hip. “Soldier!” He yells.

The Soldier sits, its mind a whirlwind, its legs no longer trustworthy. The magazine slips out of its hands and flutters to the ground.

The Handler relaxes.

Eons of memories rush back into the Soldier. A sun ignites in him, filling him with an awareness of galaxies, dimensions, the fabric of reality itself gliding over his gloved fingers. His eyes, if the Hydra techs could see them under his tactical goggles, glow violet.

And for the first time in decades, he no longer hurts.

He glances down at the metal arm. It is the work of an idle thought to fix its crude internal mechanics into something that is worthy of him.

The red-haired tech pauses as he reaches down to retrieve his magazine. “Its arm just did something weird.”

“Did you see that too?” A female tech gasped. “It glowed for a sec, like something bad fucked up inside it.”

“Ugh, I hope it’s not the power core again. That shit is so radioactive,” groans the Chief Tech, an old man who had taken over from the Russians. He flicks a switch and the restraints snap out across the Soldier’s chest, arms and legs.

The creature who was once a Soldier startles, his head whipping round to look at the Chief Tech.

“C’mon, big guy, sit down. We gotta look at your arm—“ the red-haired tech begins, but his voice dies in his throat as the metal restraints snap like paper.

It turns out you can, in fact, kill somebody with a copy of Time magazine.

The red-haired tech falls, the tightly-rolled magazine protruding from his eye socket.

Someone hits the alarm. Someone else tells the Hydra commando teams pouring into the lab that _it’s okay, they took his weapons off him._

He laughs. He _is_ a weapon.

And then the room is full of wings.

He looks up, and opens his arms. It’s the fallen cherubim, who remember their debt to him. The pair he saved in 1944 have brought friends.

The odds are bad enough for the 200 Hydra cadres in the subterranean Oregon base, if they only had to fight him. (He feels no pity. They methodically tortured him and trained him to kill for 70 years. Is it not right they experience the fruits of their labour?) But assisted by a dozen flying beasts of fang and claw and tail that still haven’t forgiven the harms done to their own on Nazi operating tables? It’s not a battle. It’s a massacre.

When it is over, he almost wishes the fight had lasted longer. He hits the self-destruct on the base and then takes himself and the cherubim Between to a nearby hillside, to watch the explosion and to catch up on all the gossip from the infernal realms.

* * *

“Renata?”

The Secretary of State steps into the darkened kitchen. He’s in his pyjamas, just heading down to get milk before bed when he heard the noise.

He rests his hand on the hidden drawer where he keeps a gun. His housekeeper should have left hours ago.

“I’m so sorry, Mr Pierce, I forgot my phone and didn’t realise until I was almost home,” the elderly Latina says, holding up an older-model iPhone in a tacky white diamanté case as she steps into the light by the marble-and-antiqued-wood kitchen island.

 _These Mexicans_ , Pierce thinks. _No taste at all_. He frowns at her. “Renata, I don’t like you in the house this late. And I don’t like your phone being left around. From now on at work, your phone stays in your handbag. If I see it again, I’ll ask Jack to confiscate it during the work day.”

The woman cringes, her bargain-store pink overcoat, fuzzy and pilled from age, hitching awkwardly. “I’m so sorry, Mr Pierce. I’ve not been feeling well, and if I don’t call in, my kids will worry—“

—her eyes unfocus in surprise, and her hand reaches out as she sways. She’s falling before Pierce’s brain can fully comprehend what’s going on, and her head hits the edge of a drawer.

“Renata!” Pierce shouts. He hurries over to where she lies on her back on the cherry-wood floor. She’s out cold, and starting to bleed from her forehead.

It’ll stain the wood. Blood is a bitch to get out of cherry. Pierce should know.

He puts the gun on the kitchen island and presses the hidden panic button recessed into the counter’s underside. Then he grabs a dish towel and squats down near Renata, to slip the towel under her head and keep her from ruining the floor.

Renata’s eyes fly open when she feels Pierce’s hand on the back of her neck. Pierce has a moment to wonder whether her eyes had always been ice-blue when she reaches out and grabs him by the throat.

Pierce chokes in surprise and tries to pull her fingers off him. Her hand is cold, and far stronger than he would ever have imagined.

Then Renata grins.

And reality itself seems to tilt on its side for a moment as five foot two of elderly Latina housekeeper stretches and morphs into six foot two of genetically-altered, metal-armed killing machine, in black combat trousers and a white undershirt.

Everything has stopped making sense to Pierce, other than he is having the life choked out of him by his own weapon. Pierce is not a stupid man, and so he chokes out the failsafe trigger that will shut the Soldier down: “Sputnik.”

The Winter Soldier laughs as he stands, all fluid grace, Pierce hanging by the throat from his outstretched arm like he weighed a fraction of his 180lbs.

“Sputnik!” Pierce tries again, louder, clearer.

The Winter Soldier grins. That’s when fear finally digs its talons into Pierce. The Winter Soldier doesn’t have facial expressions, and it certainly never smiles.

“You Hydra idiots thought you made your toy soldier the most dangerous thing on Earth. But you never saw me _unmade_.” The Soldier casually tosses Pierce against some cabinets.

Pierce gasps for air and jams his finger against the panic button. Why is nobody coming?

“Because they’re dead,” the Soldier says. “All except Renata, who is safe at home. You and I are the only ones alive in this whole property.”

“Who are you?” Pierce says. He can’t accept that this is their Soldier. It must be a faker, some sort of shapeshifter, and it must want something. Something it can be given in exchange for leaving Pierce alive.

The thing in the Soldier’s body crouches down in front of him. “Do you believe in Hell, Secretary Pierce?”

Pierce’s eyes widen. He shakes his head, nervously. It’s not an answer.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” the Soldier says, picking Pierce up by the throat again. “Believe in it or not, you’re headed there tonight. I will be escorting you home, personally.” The Soldier smiles its terrible smile again, and its eyes begin to glow. “And don’t worry, this is only the first of the thousand times you will die.”

He throws Pierce up in the air, a casual flick of the wrist. “And the least painful.”

Tentacles rip out of the Soldier’s back and Pierce has a moment to gape at them in horror before the largest one circles his neck and breaks it.

Pierce’s head hits the corner of the expensive marble counter as his corpse falls.

His blood pools wet and thick on the cherry floor as the ice cubes in his milk melt on the counter above.

* * *

“Anything new this week?” Fury asks on his next visit.

“He just came back from a run,” Patty says.”He, uh, I think he’s been mapping out the fences around the property, maybe as a prelude to an escape.”

“Hmm,” Fury says. He’d dug into the background of the Shield psychologist who had recommended isolation for Rogers. The man had turned out to be a Hydra plant, and now Fury was in the position of having to salvage the recruitment of Rogers, which was a mission that seemed to be going more sideways by the moment.

“He’s found all the bugs and cameras in the cabin, too,” Ed adds. “They’re all out.”

“All of them?” Fury asks, his voice incredulous.

“Yeah, every one,” Patty says.

Fury leans over Ed as he pages through video feed after video feed, all blank. “When did this happen?”

“About an hour ago,” Ed says. “They all went dark.”

“You mean an hour ago, while he was out running?” Fury says, already turning to leave.

“…oh, _shit_ ,” Ed says.

Fury gets in his car and floors it the fifteen miles from the field office to Rogers’ cabin.

* * *

Steve toes off his muddy running shoes on the porch and shuffles inside. He’s run for three hours, and it’s almost enough to calm the jitters under his skin. The beginnings of a plan are forming in his head: Get out. Disappear. Go in search of people who know about magic. About demons. It feels good, to have a goal once more.

For a moment, it’s like he can smell Bucky’s scent again, that faint underlying tang of brimstone that he’s missed so much.

Steve is through the door and into the cabin’s open-plan dining room / kitchen / living room before he notices the figure leaning back against the kitchen counter, flanked by two creatures that look like living gargoyles.

It’s Bucky.

Steve’s heart stops.

Memory is a fickle mistress. It’s only been four weeks since Steve woke up in the future; five since he watched Bucky fall into the white abyss of the Italian Alps. Yet already, he is losing his image of Bucky. He still knows perfectly the dark, exotic length of his lashes, the smell of his hair, the warmth of his body. His freckles, which were for Steve the imperfect detail that made Bucky perfect. The Bucky in his mind was like a Roman mosaic, made up of tiny bright glimpses, and every day another small part of the image would go missing. The losses were so minor as to go unnoticed, until one day Steve realised he couldn’t picture the whole of Bucky’s face with any accuracy. The mosaic was too damaged to return a cohesive picture.

And so it takes Steve a moment to get used to what he is seeing, in front of him.

It’s Bucky, but he’s _bigger_ , with the size and thick muscles and long hair of his angelic form, but no wings. Only a metal arm, its surface gleaming as it emerges from the sleeve of a rolled-up flannel shirt.

Steve makes a low noise in his throat and throws himself at Bucky, wrapping his arms around his lover’s new, broader form, buying his face in a neck whose scent he knows as well as his own. That had not faded: the brimstone and cedar and musky smell of him.

Bucky hugs him so hard Steve thinks his ribs might crack, but it’s okay, because Bucky’s _here_ , somehow, by some miracle.

Bucky nuzzles Steve’s ear, and Steve looks up to see tears in his bright eyes. “Promised I’d get you home safe from the war,” Bucky says, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Just… was a little late, that’s all.”

Steve snorts. He pushes himself away so he can get a look at Bucky. “What happened to you? Where did you go?” His fingers run across Bucky’s thick chest, down over biceps his hand can barely span. “Also, Bucky, what is this?”

Bucky sighs. “Hydra got me. They shot me up with the serum. Which, personally, I find a sort of hilarious irony—”

“Bucky!” Steve’s eyes widen in shock. “That’s not funny.”

Bucky moves to stand next to Steve, and bumps his shoulder with his own. “Yes it is.” He grins at Steve, until Steve starts to giggle, despite himself.

“Okay, it’s sort of funny,” Steve says.

There’s so much to take in, even in Bucky’s few words: Hydra still existing, it taking him hostage for decades, the suggestion that their war is not over. The overall shadow of Shield, and what it wants from Steve. What it keeps asking.

But all of that is for tomorrow. Today, right now, he’s still stunned by the simple fact of Bucky’s presence, so happy and overwhelmed that he’s a little stupid with it.

His hands reach out, succumbing to the gravitational pull of Bucky’s beefy new body. The flannel shirt does little to soften the hard ridges and deep cuts of his chest. He pokes Bucky’s pec, a solid swell of muscle. “Jesus, Buck. This permanent?” Steve asks.

Part of Steve hopes so. The part that loves for Bucky to hold him down is absolutely thrilled that Bucky is now his height, and even bulkier than him.

“You like it?” Bucky says, his voice dropping a register.

Steve whines, and Bucky cages him against the counter, resting his forehead against Steve’s. He growls something in another language, eyes darting to the side, and the two gargoyles hop off the counter and clatter upstairs.

“It’s permanent,” Bucky whispers, brushing his lips across Steve’s. “Between the serum and the prosthetic, it’s somehow changed the way I’m perceived by the universe. This form is mine again, it belongs to me, and… Steve,” he says, his eyes wet, “It’s _mine_.”

Bucky must see the flicker of dismay that goes across Steve’s face because his expression turns dark, and lustful. “Baby…” he says, stroking a thumb down Steve’s jaw. “That doesn’t mean I can’t assume my other forms. Wings might be pushing my luck, but…” Then Bucky’s backing away, not even bothering to unbutton his shirt as he pulls it over his head in one smooth motion. His jeans and boots follow, in a heap on the floor. He isn’t wearing underwear.

A moment later, his tentacles are unrolling down his back, and he steps into Steve’s space, all acres of muscled, bare flesh and thick, silken-grey appendages. He licks his lips. “Hi,” he purrs.

“Hello,” Steve says, his breath catching in his throat, his running shorts suddenly very constricting.

“I ripped out all Shield’s surveillance cameras, which means we have about half an hour before your watchdog from Shield arrives,” Bucky says, mischief in his glowing eyes as he idly thumbs one of Steve’s nipples through his thin running shirt. “Got any ideas how we can spend it?”

“One or two,” Steve says.

“They involve wearing clothes?” Bucky asks, tugging at Steve’s shirt.

“Nope,” Steve replies.

“What do you want me to do?” Bucky whispers, lips brushing Steve’s ear. “You know I’ll do anything for you. Just ask.”

Steve shuts his eyes as Bucky’s fingers dip under the waistband of his running shorts, easing them over his erection and down his thighs. “You remember the first time you tied me up? I want you to do that again, but fuck me until I can’t remember my own name.”

“Fuck,” Bucky breathes, leaning towards Steve’s warmth. “Steve, I haven’t had sex in 75 years. I haven’t come since I was last with you.” Heavy tentacles wrap around Steve’s shoulders and a pair of smaller ones skate down his ass, wriggling between his cheeks. “I’m going to flood you.”

Steve resists the urge to drop to his knees, right there in the kitchen, and instead just embraces Bucky. His lover’s body is — and always has been — so warm, and being wrapped in his arms and his tentacles makes Steve feel like the very last of the Arctic ice entombing him is finally melting away. He runs his fingers up Bucky’s back, around the sensitive bases of his tentacles, and up his neck into his hair.

He fully expects Bucky to push into him, to start guiding him to bed, but instead Bucky shudders, and sags in his arms. It’s such a shock to Steve that all he can do is simply guide them both to the ground. He starts to take his hands off Bucky, so he can lean back and see what’s going on with him, but Bucky just whimpers out a short “no” and shudders again, before snuggling in closer to Steve.

He’s panting, like he’s having a panic attack or he’s exhausted, and this terrifies Steve because he’s never seen Bucky react like this before. Steve’s hands rub up and down Bucky’s neck, trying to soothe him. “What is it, Buck? What’s wrong? Tell me,” Steve says softly.

Bucky raises his head. There’s a strange light in his eyes, paler than the usual warm lavender. “I’m fine,” he says, in almost a monotone. He presses his lips together afterwards, as if words would fly out of his mouth unbidden, and he must keep them inside at all costs.

Steve runs a hand down Bucky’s back to his largest tentacles, then traces his fingers along the closer one until he’s midway down it. He wraps it around his forearm and brings it up to his lips.

It still tastes sweet.

“Well, I’m not fine,” Steve says. “I have nothing to do and nobody to talk to, and they want me to keep fighting, and until you came back I wasn’t even sure who the enemy was any more. But I guess it’s still Hydra,” he sighs.

Bucky shivers a third time. Then he laughs, low and rough, to himself. “You spoiled me, you know,” he says, looking up at Steve. The light in his eyes is less brittle, now. “Nobody ever really touched me, before you. At least, not the way you do.” His eyes follow Steve’s fingers, where they rub the underside of the tentacle he’s wrapped his arm in. “Then Hydra… they never touched me with kindness. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. It was an ugly perversion of the thing I loved.”

Bucky sits straighter then, and lifts his chin. “Nobody should put their hands on me but you.”

So Steve does.

He maps out Bucky’s broad, hard, warrior-angel body with his fingers, drawing the pads of his thumbs over dark nipples until they harden and contract, shouldering aside muscular thighs so he can begin kissing his way down Bucky’s groin.

Bucky arches back in pleasure, a series of soft, husky moans being wrung out of him. He used to be louder, Steve thought, flicking his tongue into the crease of Bucky’s hip. Even in the middle of a war zone, he was louder. Now, there’s only the thump of a tentacle thrashing against the floor to let Steve know when he’s hitting a spot that drives Bucky wild.

In an effort to coax more out of Bucky, Steve takes his demon’s semi-soft cock into his mouth, swallowing it down as much as he can. His palms rub broad strokes up Bucky’s thighs and sides, and he closes his eyes in bliss as he feels Bucky harden in his mouth. To know that Bucky showed him vulnerability, and to be able to make him feel good in his body again, it’s almost overwhelming. When Steve is almost choking on Bucky, he slips off, and presses a kiss to the tip of his dick.

“Bedroom,” Steve says, his voice hoarse. “Please, Bucky. I need you.”

Bucky surges forwards, wrapping Steve up in arms and tentacles and lifting him up as if he weighed nothing. “Not as much as I need you,” Bucky says in a rough whisper.

He carries Steve upstairs to the bedroom, laying him down on the bed almost reverently. Then he sniffs, and growls, “Ulla… come out from under there.”

The darker of the two gargoyles wiggles out from the space under the bed, with a peeved expression on its face. Bucky merely points to the door, and says, “shut it on the way out.”

And Steve remembers where he’s seen the gargoyle before. “That’s the creature… that was chained up in the castle in Germany, isn’t it?”

Bucky nods. “A fallen cherub.”

Ulla glares over their shoulder at Bucky, snorting their annoyance as they wrap their tail around the doorknob. The effect of their ire is undercut by the way their upper lip is snagged over a fang. Steve has to admit to himself that the creature is so ugly, they’re cute.

Then the door slams shut.

Steve smiles, and stretches across the king-size bed, and then gets on his knees, his back to Bucky. He reaches his hands behind himself and grips his opposite elbows. Then he lowers his head, submissively.

There’s a rumbling behind him that goes straight to his dick. And then the first tentacle is wrapping around him, shifting his hands so that his wrists are crossed, low on his back.

“Do you want me to blindfold you?” Bucky asks as he weaves his smaller tentacles around Steve’s wrists and forearms. Steve can feel the warmth of Bucky’s body radiating behind him.

Steve shakes his head. “Not this time. I want to see you,” he breathes. He’s already hard.

“Okay,” Bucky says, and then Steve is being turned and pushed onto his back by Bucky’s heavier tentacles.

Steve looks up at Bucky looming over him, and moans. It’s a hell of a sight. He goes to reach for his cock, to stroke himself, momentarily forgetting he’s already half-bound. The tentacles around his wrists lock tight, and a larger one swings into view from over Bucky’s shoulder to bind Steve’s upper arms to his chest.

Bucky just kneels there, hand tightly around the base of his own hard, dripping cock, as his tentacles manipulate Steve’s legs so they are bent, knees spread, ankles crossed over his groin. Two tentacles slither around his legs, slowly binding them so they can’t stretch out again. The slow drag of tentacles winding and tightening against his skin has Steve writhing, his mouth open, trying to spread himself more for Bucky. Finally, the tips of the tentacles binding Steve’s legs reach around behind him and lock into the ones binding his arms.

Bucky leans down and kisses Steve’s toes, before sucking one into his mouth. When he pulls away, he says, “You’re so beautiful like that, Steve. “ His eyes are luminous with desire as they rake across Steve’s body. “Are you okay?”

Steve nods. He’s fine, except what Bucky has done in tying him has locked his cock in place underneath the tentacle binding his crossed ankles, so he can’t get any relief.

Bucky seems to sense Steve’s frustration, and licks a long stripe up from his hole to the base of his balls. Steve screams.

“Yes, baby,” Bucky smirks, and Steve can feel that smile against the underside of his balls. “You’re going to come completely untouched for me. Now how do you want to be opened up, on my tongue, or on my tentacles?”

“Tongue,” Steve says.

“So be it,” Bucky purrs, lowering his head.

A last free tentacle snags a pillow and gently pushes it under Steve’s lower back, tilting his hips up.

Steve feels Bucky’s mismatched hands, both equally warm but one of inhuman texture, spread his ass. Bucky hums in appreciation at what he sees.

“Get on with it,” Steve groans.

There’s an amused huff from Bucky, and then he dives in. Steve wants to writhe away and towards that tongue at the same time, but he can’t do either, because Bucky’s tentacles hold him absolutely fast. He can’t even do anything about the throbbing in his cock, other than just try to breathe through it until his orgasm overtakes him.

He’s not there yet, but he’s not far, either. Bucky is seemingly trying to make up for 70 years of lost time at once, not just tonguing inside Steve, but licking, kissing and biting every part of his ass that Bucky can reach.

Steve can already feel the bone-deep stress and terror of the previous weeks melting off him, dissolving off into that weightless, soft feeling that soaks through him when he is bound by Bucky’s tentacles. It’s not control, in the sense Steve has always thought of control: it’s more like a very extreme hug, and Steve doesn’t have to worry any more, because he can’t worry, there’s nothing he can do but relax, stay in the clouds, and let Bucky take care of him for a while.

He comes back to more of a bodily awareness when he feels a hard, metal finger pressing against his entrance.

“Is this okay?” Bucky asks, pressing a kiss to the back of his thigh and circling the fingers of his metal hand around Steve’s hole.

Steve can suddenly picture it in his mind: the shiny silver fingers, the soft pink of his most private areas. He whines, high and needy, and Bucky, thankfully, takes that as a yes.

His first orgasm rocks through him as Bucky slides two metal fingers deep in him. He shouts and convulses as come splatters on his chest, his body flushing a hot scarlet.

Bucky looms over him and kisses him afterwards, when he’s soft and happy. “I missed your face when you came,” Bucky says. “It’s one of my favourite sights, watching your expression when you get off.” He traces two metal fingers down from Steve’s balls to his hole. “Alas, I was busy.”

“Mm, you’ll just have to make me come again, then,” Steve murmurs, still dopey with endorphins.

And Bucky gets a wicked expression on his face. “Since you asked so nicely,” he says.

Then Bucky puts one hand on Steve’s thigh and his other around his dick and Steve knows he’s lining himself up and all he can do is hiss “ _yes_ ” when he feels Bucky’s cockhead against his hole.

Bucky looks him straight in the eyes as he pushes in so, so slowly, with an expression of such wonder and longing, that more than anything else it’s Bucky’s face that sparks Steve into arousal again, not the slow slide of Bucky’s cock into him.

Bucky is finally all the way inside him, the burn and stretch of him racing through Steve even as it starts to abate. But Bucky doesn’t move. He just rests there, slumped forwards over Steve, arms bracketing Steve’s sides, tentacles caging Steve’s limbs. And Steve looks up at the impossible perfection of him and his heart soars, because he, Steve Rogers, gets to have this beautiful, ridiculous, brave creature, and nobody else does.

Steve smiles, impossibly fond, when he focuses again on Bucky’s face. “You kept the freckles,” he says.

“I’ve always had them,” Bucky replies.

“Most humans think they’re an imperfection. So they’re funny to see on an angel.”

“Well,” Bucky says, drawing back to kiss Steve’s right knee, “humans think a lot of stupid things.”

Then Bucky shuts his eyes and snaps his hips, moving his cock only in and out of Steve an inch.

Steve arches and moans through gritted teeth. God, he’s missed this. “Bucky,” he pants. “More.”

“I can’t, Steve,” Bucky says, his cheeks flushed and his eyes heavy-lidded with arousal. “I’m so close, you have no idea. M’just gonna do this real slow and try to last.”

And he does just that, alternating long, leisurely drags of his cock almost all the way out of Steve and back in, with short little snaps of his hips that ram him that final inch home and then some.

Steve is drifting. All he knows is that he’s rock-hard and been floating on the edge of his second orgasm for what seems forever now. Time doesn’t exist before this moment or after it, there is only this endless unfolding bliss.

He looks up at Bucky, his vision unfocused, everything warm around the edges. Bucky is transformed; there had been a brittleness to him that seems to have sloughed off him as he slowly makes love to Steve. His soft, plush lower lip catches in his teeth as he thrusts into Steve. Then his lip slips out again, wet with saliva and rosy with arousal. His rhythm slips then, an involuntary jerk of the hips that sends him pushing into Steve much more quickly than before.

Bucky’s abs and chest muscles tighten, and he moans, wanton. Then Bucky’s hands are reaching under Steve, lifting his hips higher, as Bucky shifts his own weight so he can fuck into Steve hard and fast.

Steve is almost bent in half in this position, his ankles still bound and crossed but they’re now up around Bucky’s chest. The angle means Bucky is no longer dragging along Steve’s prostate, but hitting it every time. Steve doesn’t even know what is coming out of his mouth any more, some slurried mess of Bucky and yes and harder, and Bucky obliges. Bucky truly loses himself in Steve, eyes shut, body chasing after only its own pleasure. It’s the first time Steve has ever seen Bucky like this, just completely letting go, and it feels like some invisible but crucial border has been crossed, that they are both now in completely unexplored territory.

Steve watches Bucky — his angel, his demon — take what he needs from Steve’s body, his rhythm getting sloppier until finally with one last, brutal thrust, Bucky comes. Bucky reaches for him then. As his dark come floods Steve’s channel, his metal hand grips Steve’s cock and that’s all it takes to pull Steve below the crashing wave of his own orgasm.

He’s still coming down from it as Bucky’s tentacles unlock from around him, the long appendages stretching out his arms and legs and rubbing the soreness out of his muscles. Bucky, for all intents and purposes, is bonelessly asleep next to him, the only movement being in his tentacles and the occasional sliver of lavender from an eyelid that isn’t quite as closed as Bucky would like it to seem.

Steve immediately snuggles in close to Bucky, tucking his head against Bucky’s chest and draping an arm over his back. Steve’s hand finds one of the fatter tentacles and casually circles its base.

Bucky presses a kiss into his hair. “I love you, you know. I never understood love in the specific sense, until I met you. The general sense, of course, but…” Bucky tilts Steve’s chin up and smiles at him, as brilliant as the sun. “I _love_ you.”

Steve grins up at Bucky. “I love you too. Also, I have a plan.”

“Oh no,” Bucky groans. “I’m going to hate it, aren’t I?”

“Mmyeah,” Steve says.

Bucky gently tucks Steve’s head back into his chest. “Remind me why I agreed to keep you out of trouble?”

Steve just sighs, and burrows as close to Bucky as he can. Bucky folds his tentacles over him, and it’s like he’s in a world that’s all his lover, butterscotch skin and dove-grey tentacles, the tentacles’ phosphorescent spots providing just enough light to be soothing.

They don’t have much time, Steve knows, until their unwanted visitor arrives. But against seventy years apart, every moment together matters. He’ll take harbor for as long as possible in Bucky’s arms, until he hears the heavy Shield SUV coming up the gravel driveway, until their fate cannot be put off any longer.

* * *

When Fury walks in to Rogers’ cabin, the place is calm.

Rogers is standing in the kitchen, in a t-shirt and a pair of sweats that look at least a size too small for him. He’s not alone. There’s a dark-haired man sitting on the kitchen counter. The man’s face is obscured by long hair, but his body — in a flannel shirt and jeans — is easily as muscular as Rogers’.

Several things happen very quickly after that. Rogers turns and smiles at Fury, and Fury sees that his lips are flushed and wet. _Lover_ , Fury thinks. Then the other man looks up, and Fury is not at all surprised at the face he sees. The metal arm, however, causes him the first of several shocks that day. _Huh_ , Fury thinks. Shield’s best guess had been that the Winter Soldier was a codename passed down from operative to operative. But apparently not.

Fury’s hand ghosts slowly towards the pistol at his hip. “That Hydra base that exploded in Oregon. That was you?”

The dark-haired man grins. His metal arm lies possessively across Rogers’ stomach, keeping him between the V of the man’s legs. Rogers leans back against him, and Barnes hooks his chin over Rogers’ shoulder.

Rogers is… not the same. There is no sign of the anxious, lost soldier pulled from the ice. The man in front of him, relaxing in his lover’s arms, is collected, calm and determined.

“We wanted to let you know we’ll be leaving here. Thank you for your help and the loan of the cabin, but it’s not needed any more,” Rogers says.

“Where are you going to go?” Fury asks.

“Don’t know yet,” Steve says.

“We’d like you to stay with Shield,” Fury tries. “For your own safety. Hydra’s going to come after you. Both of you.”

This earns him an unsettlingly savage smile from Barnes. “Let them try,” he says.

“And besides,” Fury continues, “there’s the small matter of the money that the American government spent, not only developing the serum that gave Captain Rogers his body and abilities, but in digging you out of the ice and and resuscitating you. While we’re grateful for what you achieved during the war, three years’ service isn’t even a full tour of duty. You—“

Fury’s next words are cut off by a crash from the upstairs bedroom. Barnes rolls his eyes. “Nezath! Ulla! Whatever you’re doing, stop it!”

There’s more crashing and rustling from above, then the clack of nails on the staircase.

Barnes raises his flesh hand and looks at Fury. “Don’t be alarmed, they’re friendly. Unless you threaten us, and then they’ll tear your throat out.”

Fury expects dogs. Dobermans, maybe. He does not expect the scaled, toothy, clawed monsters half-flying, half-scampering down the stairs.

Fury glances back to Barnes, who looks smug. “Demons?” Fury asks. “Really?”

“Old friends,” Barnes says.

The two demons waddle over to Barnes and heft themselves up on the counter next to him, snuggling against his bulk. He reaches over and scratches under the toothy jaw of the pale one. Barnes mutters to them, strange harmonic syllables in a language that Fury has never heard.

Fury takes in the infernal creatures’ obvious comfort with Barnes, and reaches the inevitable conclusion. His gaze flicks up to Rogers’. “I’m impressed you kept your sergeant’s… _true nature_ out of even the SSR’s Top Secret files.”

“I also kept it from Hydra, for what that’s worth,” Barnes adds.

“I guessed as much, or we’d all be speaking German now,” Fury says.

Barnes looks down and blushes, a shy smile on his face. “True.”

“Who else knew?” Fury asks.

Steve shrugs. “Peggy, Howard, Colonel Philips, Erskine. In the squad, Morita definitely knew. The rest had suspicions, but not that he was an archdemon.” Steve smiles as he lets the dark red demon snuffle his hand. “That’s not the only thing we kept out of reports.”

Fury raises an eyebrow.

“See,” Steve begins, “One of the problems with your argument is assuming the SSR’s serum made me what I am today, and thus I have an obligation to Shield as the inheritor of the SSR. But the serum didn’t work, which is why it’s never been recreated successfully.”

“For what it’s worth, I still think this is a stupid plan,” Bucky mumbles.

Steve swats Bucky on the thigh. Then he turns his attention back to Fury. “The serum would have killed me. Erskine injected me with a placebo that day. I got my abilities from him summoning a demon. _This_ demon.”

This is the second ugly shock of the day for Fury. It’s not a feeling he enjoys.

“And now the demon is going to take those abilities away again,” Steve says.

Bucky sighs, rolls his eyes, and places his mismatched hands on Steve’s shoulders. “Look, pal,” Bucky says to Fury, “If it’s any consolation, I can’t control him either.” Then Bucky’s eyes begin to glow, an eerie grey-lavender. And Steve…

…Steve _shifts_ , and becomes smaller. Captain America is gone, and in his place is 5’5”, 110lbs of Steve Rogers. His t-shirt hangs off slim, pale shoulders; the sweatpants ride low enough to show the white curve of Steve’s ass. He stumbles, his balance off, and Bucky’s hands move under his arms to steady him. “You okay?” Bucky says softly, moving a hand up to brush Steve’s bangs out of his face.

“Yeah, I’m good. And hey, I can breathe,” Steve says, patting himself.

Bucky looks momentarily offended. “I’m not giving you back all those health problems, Steve.” Then his eyes rake down Steve’s smaller form, pupils darkening. “I forgot how lovely you were like this,” he rasps out.

Steve links his long, thin fingers into articulated metal ones. “Still think it’s a stupid plan?”

Bucky makes a rumbling sound in his chest, and his eyes narrow at Fury, as if calculating how fast he can get the man out of their house.

“So, Director Fury. I’ll happily serve out the last year of my active service as Steve Rogers, perhaps in some sort of analytical capacity? Although since I haven’t really learned much about the modern world, staying in this cabin, maybe that wouldn’t work out so well,” Steve says. “And of course I’ll stay in reserve in case anything truly world-threatening happens.”

Fury shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He’d been wrong about Captain America. Completely, terribly wrong. The man wasn’t an asset because of what the serum had supposedly given him. He was an asset because of what he already had: courage, a supreme grasp of tactics, and the ability to inspire loyalty in the strangest places. Fury sighs, shaking his head. “I’ll look into ways we can use you, Rogers. In the meantime, assume you’re on leave for the foreseeable future.”

“And him?” Steve says sharply, indicating Bucky.

Fury looks at Bucky, then back to Steve. He cracks a smile, the first one Steve has ever seen on him. “Rogers, much as I’d enjoy Hydra knowing how much they fucked up by having something as powerful as your friend in their hands and failing to realise it, there is no way _anything_ you told me today is going anywhere near a report.” He fishes in his trench coat pocket and pulls out a cellphone, tossing it to Steve. “Enjoy your vacation. I’ll call you if the planet needs saving.” Then, he’s striding away from them.

Steve realises that he’s succeeded. They’re free.

Fury glances back, in the doorway. “You met Howard’s kid?”

Steve shakes his head. “No.”

“You should. You’ll love him and hate him, at the same time,” Fury says. “He lives in California.”

And then Fury is gone.

Steve and Bucky look at each other, and Steve starts to giggle. Bucky rolls his eyes again, then picks Steve up, divesting him of his perilously low sweatpants in the process, and wraps Steve’s legs around his waist. “I could get used to you like this,” Bucky says, pressing his lips against Steve’s. “But it’s not so much fun to push around someone smaller. Maybe you’ll have to start fucking me.”

Steve whimpers at that image, and Bucky’s tongue sweeps into his mouth. They barely kiss for more than a moment before Nezath and Ulla, the two cherubim, decide it’s family snuggle time, and also climb into Bucky’s lap, shoving their toothy, square heads between Steve and Bucky as they growl-purr their contentment. Bucky grumbles at them about cockblocking, but Steve notices that he doesn’t attempt to shove them away.

Steve laughs and throws his arms around their scaly backs as he leans forward to press his forehead against Bucky’s. 24 hours before, he’d been utterly miserable, a man sinking beneath the weight of a symbol, with all his life’s meager allotment of happiness seemingly seventy years behind him.

Now, though. Now the world was ablaze again with possibilities, and the future stretched warm and golden in front of him.

* * *

The residents of Malibu know something is up with the bossy little blond and his big, beefy boyfriend almost as soon as they move into the beach house a few miles down the way from Stark’s place. There’s the dogs, first of all. The charming, dark-haired one — Buddy or something — just smiles and says they’re Mexican hairless fighting mastiffs which, for one, don’t exist, and two, _dogs don’t have wings_. But they leave Dede Rademeyer’s frankly vicious Goldens alone, as well as Pete Thorn’s obnoxious min-pin Mr Truffles, so the residents’ association decides to turn a blind eye to the Barnes-Grant household’s exotic pets for now.

Then there’s the matter of Barnes’ metal arm, which everyone assumes is something their local robotics billionaire built, until the night Stark sees it from across the room in a neighborhood restaurant and loses his shit. The brunet laughs and treats it all as a joke, while the little blond sticks himself between his man and Stark with a glare on his face that makes it seem like he is about two seconds away from punching Stark in the face if Stark so much as lays a finger on Barnes. (He is).

The blond is an artist, they learn, as sketches and paintings start showing up in local galleries. Nobody can figure out what the brunet does for a living, other than spend a lot of time on the beach looking picturesque. (Several local divorcées invest in binoculars.) He teaches himself to surf, and reddish streaks from the sun start appearing in his shoulder-length hair.

There’s still something off about them, though. Neither of them seem to have social media accounts, which is frankly bizarre in this day and age. So they could possibly be excused for not knowing who some of the more distinguished Malibu residents were at first. But after six months, when Grant and Barnes have failed to reach out to any of the Good Set but are on a first-name basis with every taco truck employee, supermarket check-out cashier and gardener in the area, it starts to seem like a slight.

It also becomes an issue of neighborhood safety, after there is a brutal, if unsuccessful, home invasion at the Grant-Barnes beach house. The older residents shake their heads and mutter _that’s what you should expect, making friends with the lower classes_. But the next day at the farmers’ market, Barnes is as charming and flirtatious as ever, and even Grant seems less intense, grinning and enjoying the summer day as they buy fruit. Neither of them have a scratch on them.

Of course, Reece McCormick III swears blind he sees Barnes at midnight a few evenings later, sitting on his surfboard, talking to something huge and monstrous just beyond the wave line, but everyone knows Reece is completely D-R-U-N-K by 8pm most nights, so nobody pays him much mind. Everyone cringes a bit when he confronts Barnes at the coffee shop about it, but Barnes just smiles that sunny smile of his and shrugs and says one of his relatives had decided to drop in unexpectedly and sorry about the noise.

Reece is rough-hewn and over-tan and doesn’t like to be dismissed. He takes a step towards Barnes, his voice rising in volume and an index finger pointing at Barnes’ chest.

It might have turned into something, but then phones light up throughout the café. One of the baristas looks at hers, and shrieks.

It’s the end of the world.

* * *

The aliens explode bright and deadly over the skies of Manhattan one early autumn morning. New York is moved to resist the invasion not only by the heroics of the Avengers, but by the sight of Captain America wading into the battle, flag-bright in red, white and blue, flinging his shield at the extraterrestrial menaces like he’d been fighting aliens his whole life.

Most people don’t notice the dark shadow following Cap from the rooftops, picking off those aliens that Cap’s shield couldn’t get.

When the last alien had been knocked out of the sky, when the portal vanishes, Cap stands on a pile of rubble and raises his shield and New York gets to its feet and cheers. Hell, most of America does.

And then he disappears.

As every nearby reporter sprints for his last known location, Cap just walks into an alley and vanishes, like he’d never existed at all.

* * *

Bucky and Steve don’t step out of Between so much as _fall_ out of it, into the quiet of their glass-walled beachfront living room. It’s still sunny here, whereas in New York the sky is fading into the hazy cobalt of night. Malibu is as perfect as it ever is: the neat, minimal swathe of beach stretching for miles either side out their windows; the soft unceasing rhythm of the sea. There’s no rubble, no smoke. No crushed cars. No bloodstains on the street.

Bucky pulls Steve’s shield off his back and kicks it unceremoniously under a sofa. The helmet comes off next, Bucky raking his soot-stained fingers through Steve’s sweaty hair and ducking in for a kiss. Then his hands start on the hidden snaps and zippers of Steve’s uniform. Steve just stands there, swaying gently, dead on his feet and finding his way back from Captain America again.

After he’s mostly out of his uniform, Steve flaps his hands at Bucky, patting the thick leather tactical jacket his partner still wears.

“Getting there,” Bucky mumbles. He sits Steve down on the sofa (“Seriously, pal, before you fall down,”) and then potters towards the kitchen, divesting himself of a truly staggering amount of small arms and blades as well as the jacket and his filthy black combat trousers and boots.

Then, in nothing but boxer briefs, Bucky stalks around the house, turning on the bath, checking to see where the two cherubim are (curled up together snoring on the chaise longue in Steve’s studio) and generally making sure the perimeter is safe.

Then he comes back to the living room and collapses on the sofa next to Steve. “M’gonna check the bath in a sec.” That had been one of the attractions of the house: a bath so big, it was really a jacuzzi, and could fit two men their size. When, of course, Steve was big.

“You miss it?” Bucky says, out of nowhere. It takes Steve a second to realise what he’s talking about.

“No,” Steve says, after a moment of thought. “I really don’t.”

Bucky leans against him, warm and hard, and makes a happy noise.

Steve throws an arm around Bucky; he thinks a little more, tapping a rhythm against Bucky’s metal shoulder as he does. “There are so many more extraordinary people, here in the future,” he continues. Then he shrugs. “I guess… I feel it’s their turn now.”

“I give you six months before I’m following your ass into some sort of trouble again,” Bucky says.

“Probably,” Steve says. “But, _one_ , it’s going to be an amazing six months, and _two_ , I think we need to find a new kind of trouble.”

Bucky groans as he brushes a kiss across Steve’s jaw. The trace of his lips is so light, it’s ticklish, and Steve giggles. “Okay, Buck, stop. Put me back, and then let’s spend a couple hours in the bath.”

Bucky’s eyes glow, and then Steve has the now-familiar seasick feeling of his body changing around him. Gone is the enhanced supersoldier, and in its place, the slim, short California artist. Truth be told, he feels better in this body than in the attention-getting, huge form of Captain America. Maybe it’s just because he’s had longer to get used to it.

And maybe it’s because sometimes it takes getting exactly what you dreamed of to realise that it wasn’t what you wanted.

He looks up at Bucky and grins.

“Perfect,” Bucky breathes, and kisses the smile right off his face.

“Yeah, it really is,” Steve says.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, why did this take me so loooong. (Does word count, oh it’s almost 10k, NO WONDER) 
> 
> But also: my life went sideways, and I had way, way too much work. 
> 
> Anyhow I hope you enjoy the end! After this I have a rare pair / non-Stucky fic to write for FTH and then I’ll be updating my other Stucky WIP I totally neglected for this. 
> 
> I had other things I wanted to say but I’ve forgotten them. Thanks for reading and all your lovely comments! They have truly brightened what’s been a very stressful month.
> 
> Also now please [go read this related, outsider POV continuation of Demonique](https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/35392119) because it is SO SO good
> 
> Lastly, this Peter Mohrbacher image of Azazel is... _yeah_. Very _Demonique_ Bucky.  
> 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [HEY! I'm trying to have a vacation over here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15258207) by [SmutLover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmutLover/pseuds/SmutLover)




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